Cyrus the Great
A night at Blues Alley with the mighty Chestnut
Books and Arts
Saturday
Friday
Wells farrago: gaslighting the Invisible Man
Priapic shower-stalking and domestic haunting were never Wells’s style – not on the page, anyway
Cats: The Snuff Movie
Too many Netflix true-crime documentaries are tiresome and overlong. This one was a lot worse than that
Birth of a nation
India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy by Madhav Khosla reviewed
Tuesday
The way we read now
The thrill is gone for lovers of fiction. Joseph Bottum on the strange death of the novel
Wednesday
Land of hope and Victoria: The Kinks’ lost empire
By 1969, Churchill was dead and the Kinks, as an album group, were toast
Monday
The Witcher’s hours
Medieval gore for millennial gamers
Sunday
Novel inspirations: H.L. Mencken, the bad boy of Baltimore
Ideas and theories were not Mencken’s meat and drink. Real people and social comedy were
Saturday
Stayin’ alive in ’75
Meryl Meisler’s photographs captured the family life and nightlife of Seventies New York
Wednesday
Style on steroids: the power of Jerry Bruckheimer
Bruckheimer may think that the Oedipus Complex is a Greek shopping mall, but the set-ups of Bad Boys and Top Gun are classical
Tuesday
‘A system at odds with the Constitution’
A conversation with Christopher Caldwell about America today
Friday
Jung love
Savage Messiah: How Dr Jordan Peterson Is Saving Western Civilization by Jim Proser reviewed
Monday
Is he talking to us?
De Niro should live up to his movie characters and stop his knee-jerk dissing of Donald Trump
Sunday
All modern art is quite useless
The contemporary artist doesn’t expect to have to suffer for what he calls his art. Away with the garret!
The Hayes of our lives
A soul survivor whose sonic alchemy endures
Friday
The soft power of Italian jazz
Eat to the beat
Friday
Kingdoms of the wicked
How to Be a Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century by Frank Dikötter reviewed
A hero for the Snowflake age
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan is now a politically correct pantywaist
The audacity of verse
The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century by John Burnside reviewed
Monday
Christmas crackers: the tragic soul of Natalie Cole
Natalie Cole had an instant pocket pop career. Her family, she said, were like ‘the black Kennedys’; and look how the Kennedys turned out
