The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
For all his reputation as one of England’s defining pop songwriters, America was Davies’ inspiration, and it is to the subject of America that he has been drawn these past few years.
Conrad Black explains how the President consistently and hilariously outplays his enemies, provoking and then exploiting the friction between him and them to raise himself to ever greater heights.
Women get paid less in Hollywood. Surely the budget for the female variation on Ocean’s Eleven and Ocean’s Thirteen could have stretched to Ocean’s Twenty? Still, Gary Ross’ crime caper is right on the money. The franchise remains familiar — perhaps too familiar — but Ocean’s Eight feels fresh, with its gender-flipping of Rat Pack … Read more
Niall Ferguson’s decision to disengage with students and their politics is wrong. While such a statement may bring glee to those on the left and may displease Ferguson himself, Ferguson’s reaction to his admitted bad judgement involving Stanford students is deeply problematic. Specifically, after being caught suggesting some fairly unethical behaviour regarding his engagement with … Read more
Back in the mists of prehistory, when I was eight, dinosaur films followed a set pattern. The dinosaurs themselves would be cheerfully unpalaeontological; women would wear improbable outfits; volcanoes would explode. Then, in 1993, courtesy of Steven Spielberg, came a sea-change. Jurassic Park was that cinematic rarity: a science fiction film that succeeded in influencing … Read more
‘The rule in our household is: if a TV series hasn’t got subtitles, it’s not worth watching,’ a friend told me the other day. Once this approach would have been both extremely limiting and insufferably pompous. In the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime, though, it makes a lot of sense. There’s something about English-speaking … Read more
Kanye West is more than halfway in to the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame — if his politics don’t block the way. This extraordinary rapper-producer first won over a worldwide audience with the 2004 anthem ‘Jesus Walks’, disrupted hip-hop’s bling-bling materialism with the us-vs-them challenge of his Jay-Z collaboration Watch the Throne, and then released the … Read more
Leon Vitali is an actor who passed through the looking glass of Stanley Kubrick’s camera and became Kubrick’s right arm. When the documentary film maker Tony Zierra discovered Vitali’s story while investigating Kubrick’s final, flawed film, Eyes Wide Shut, he decided to first make a film about Vitali, who is sixty-nine and not in good … Read more
Clancy Sigal’s posthumous autobiography is sex, guns and celebrity from start to finish.
The movement calls for a change in culture as impossible as it is counterproductive.
Couldn’t ABC have reminded people that Roseanne Barr is mentally ill, and more in need of treatment than degradation?
Of course her tweet was in bad taste. So what?
From the White House, the president offers what amount to daily lessons in the objurgatory arts.
His attitude to sex must have been warped by the superabundance of opportunity.
Birds in the Ancient World is a consummation of all of Jeremy Mynott’s accomplishments
Arranging a dinner between Tom Wolfe and Christopher Hitchens led to my immortalisation in literature.
‘That was some weird shit,’ George W. Bush is said to have muttered after Donald Trump’s desolate inauguration speech of January 2017. ‘I couldn’t have agreed more,’ wrote Hillary Clinton in What Happened. Americans cannot agree on what has happened to their country, other than that everything has gone wrong. Is it ‘white supremacy’ and … Read more
The ‘Hollywood prince who torched the castle’ is to this decade what Samantha Power was to the last
Twitter outrage about a few sectarian mugs has left Lionel Shriver glad to be in her fantasy world offline
Here in the English-speaking world, the hours after work and before dinner are known as the ‘reverse commute’. We spend these hours standing on trains, sitting in cars, or pedaling for our lives. Over there in France, these hours are called the ‘cinq à sept’. Although they may also involve being pressed up against other … Read more
