London

Wednesday

Brendan O’Neill

The Golders Green atrocity is the final straw

It is undeniable now: war has been declared on British Jews. A fascistic crusade is being waged against our Jewish compatriots. The anti-Semitic atrocity in Golders Green today is further brutish proof of this unsettling fact. We’ve had fire bombings at synagogues, the murder of Jews in Manchester on Yom Kippur, and now this frenzied knifing of Jews in London. There can be no more equivocating – this is a moral emergency. The most sickening thing about today’s knife pogrom is that it was entirely predictable The scenes from Golders Green are truly grim. Video clips show the suspect wielding his knife with demented fury at two visibly Jewish men.

golders green

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Russell Brand is everything that is wrong with the world

There are few stranger public careers than that of Russell Brand, the former “comedian” turned MAGA cheerleader-in-chief. He has given an interview to Tucker Carlson, another figure who has been on his own peculiar journey, and has announced his intention of running for Mayor of London in 2028, on a vaguely defined but somehow sinister platform that includes “pragmatic” democracy for “people who live in London, who love London.” He is the strutting, peacocking representation of all that is wrong in contemporary society Brand has railed against most of Sadiq Khan’s innovations, asking: “Do you want ULEZ cameras? Do you want congestion charges? Do you want this type of policing

russell brand

Friday

Dot Wordsworth

Is a ‘link-up’ a modern ‘flash mob?’

The public disturbances in south London, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. “You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,” wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, “the surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.” Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three “flash mobs” were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in

link-up
schiaparelli
Margaret Mitchell

The art of Schiaparelli

It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how difficult her name is to pronounce. Is it “shap,” “skap” or “skyap”? Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, answers with a quip from Schiaparelli herself: “No one knows how to say it, but everyone knows what it means.” The V&A’s new exhibition Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art traces the web of influences around one of the great couture houses of the 20th century. Like Coco Chanel (I hate to compare them), Elsa Schiaparelli created clothes for the modern, independent woman – it is now conventional to say so, but they “pushed

Thursday

Philip Hensher

The fate of the British teenager who posed as a Russian oligarch’s son

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (“Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.”) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Charles Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals

zac brettler russian london

Thursday

Brendan O’Neill

Why the keffiyeh classes have forgiven Kanye West

And there you have it. Britain is a country where a musician who says “Heil Hitler” gets to headline festivals while a musician who plays with a Jew from Israel gets canceled. Threaten to go “death con 3 on Jewish people” and you’ll be grand. Jam with a Jewish person and you’re toast. Selling T-shirts adorned with the swastika? No problem. Doing a duet with someone from the Jewish state? Don’t even think about it. In the eyes of the keffiyeh-smothered windbags of the cultural elite, praising the Nazi monster who exterminated millions of Jews is a more forgivable moral error than hanging out with a Jew from Israel That

kanye west

Thursday

Mary Wakefield

Why are adults buying so many children’s toys?

On the fourth floor of Selfridges, in London, is the children’s toy department. Most of the vast space is given over to soft toys – mounds of synthetic fur, thousands of little beady eyes – and when I visited last Saturday afternoon the customers were almost all adults. I spent two hours there, standing by a tower of little Paddington bears, watching the shoppers in the queue for the register, and it was eye-opening. Almost no one was buying for a child. I saw two Chinese women with white toy lambs, a 17-year-old boy with a dragon, what looked like drug dealers waiting in line for Pokémon cards, and a

Friday

Rod Liddle

The true villains of our TV crime dramas? The creators

Idly watching the first episode of a TV crime drama series recently, I found myself in a slightly troubled frame of mind. We were already 35 minutes in and no probable villain had shown their face. We had seen black people, Chinese people, lesbians, the disabled, the impoverished and powerless, Muslims, the young and idealistic… yikes, I thought to myself, it simply can’t be any of them, can it? Surely not. And then, as if the scriptwriter had heard my private worries, for lo, a very rich, marble-mouthed white woman emerged and was shown being beastly to some young and idealistic people and I thought: bingo! We have our villain.

Thursday

Margaret Mitchell

The mindfulness behind the cooking of Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan

I am somewhat allergic to food nomenclature: zero-waste, plant-based, seasonal, small plates, “live cultures,” foraged, farm-to-fork. It’s not that these are inherently off-putting concepts, but I associate them with “foodie” fads, gimmicks and big egos. All of those trendy labels could apply to the food cooked by the “philosopher chef,” a Buddhist nun called Venerable Jeong Kwan, plus you could throw in a dash of mindfulness and eastern spirituality for good measure. Yet Kwan, who is venerated by Le Bernardin’s Eric Ripert and Noma’s René Redzepi, and has featured in an episode of Chef’s Table, is the furthest thing from an ego-chef. She has no restaurant, no recipes, cooks for

Alexander Larman

Behind Wes Anderson’s infamous sensibility

Woody Allen once sardonically described the fans of his films as being divided between those who liked the “early, funny ones” and the later, darker pictures. Much the same might be said of another famous WA: Wes Anderson, who has established himself as one of American cinema’s most significant auteurs despite no longer living in the country – he hops between England and France. Like most auteurs, his films are more succèss d’estime than they are succèss de box office, but he has the cream of Hollywood lining up to work with him and commands respect among actors young and old. Anderson is rightly celebrated – or castigated – as

Saturday

Joan Collins

Christmas in Los Angeles and London

“Never again!” I sigh every January 6, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations lovingly collected over the decades. “It’s too much!” I moan to Percy. “Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…” But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year in early November I eagerly unpack multiple boxes tenderly packed two years earlier because we like to spend Christmas in London one year and in LA the next, as we love both cities. I have quite a lot of extended family in each, so we know that celebrating in either one will be very “happy families.” But

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