It was the British political journalist Jason Cowley, writing in London’s Sunday Times a month or two back, who posed a query calculated to strike terror into the heart of any self-respecting Orwell-fancier. Were we, Cowley wondered, with the air of one who tosses a Sèvres vase into the air to watch it descend into
The constant parade of shocking and disturbing revelations from the Epstein files has been going on for a considerable time now. It shows no signs of coming to an end. Just when we all think that we’ve seen the worst of it, another 10,000 documents enter the public domain. Even though the stories have been
It’s not more than a parlor game, perhaps, to speculate about history’s most crucial inventions. One invention often makes the next possible. Electric light revolutionized human productivity, allowing us to work well beyond sundown. The combustion engine and later the turbine engine collapsed our sense of distance, putting other continents within a day’s travel. We’re
Goldman Sachs inspires awe and envy in equal measure. Those who survive the Wall Street investment bank’s annual cull earn fortunes. Leavers join an alumni network that makes the Freemasons look like plodders. The “Government Sachs” roll call includes prime ministers (Mark Carney, Mario Draghi, Rishi Sunak and Australia’s Malcolm Turnbull); US Treasury secretaries (Robert
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age at a time of unparalleled longevity. But as so often happens at the Wellcome’s exhibitions, it’s the ephemera that draw the eye first. “These 2 men are the same age,” says a leaflet advertising Kellogg’s
The title of David Byrne’s most recent album and current tour is Who Is The Sky? The phrase works two ways. Read literally, it has the playful 1960s feel of a Yoko Ono film or some absurdist Fluxus piece; firmly on brand, in other words, for someone as steeped as Byrne in New York’s downtown
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is the film that fans of the television show have long been waiting for, so I must watch what I say. The story follows a group of exceptionally violent Birmingham gangsters operating between the wars and if you see it at the cinema you’ll hear a message before the opening
Grade: B In which the foppish Davy Jones figure from the manufactured band One Direction (Zayn Malik being Peter Tork; One Direction didn’t have a Mike Nesmith) sheds the soft-rock pop-lite that has served him so well and goes with what he fondly believes is challengingly funky EDM, a genre which I do not believe
