Dress sense
With the coming of cuckoos and crocuses, cometh the catwalks. Bringing breathless news of culottes and cut-offs from Aix to Ghent, not to mention Paris, Milan and Shoreditch. I gaze at the
Infectious enthusiasms
Hard times on stage—and off it
A breath of fresh paint
Who says painting is dead? The curators of a new show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery would have us believe that painting had its last hurrah in the 1980s. The stock market boom,
A boy’s own adventure
Privileged images: the photography of Jacques Henri Lartigue
Well-tempered tones
A celebration of Sufi sounds in Rajasthan offers much to treasure
Toponymic subjugation
Excessive politeness by Britons is making a mess of place names at home and abroad
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The central political fact of our time is the defeat of the Left. Whether they are radical leftists or centre-leftists, liberal internationalists or neo-Stalinists, what binds them together is their experience of
A hinge in history
Of all that winter’s acts of bravery, the most memorable, for me, was the sign-language interpreter’s revolt. Instead of obediently relaying the rigged result of Ukraine’s presidential election on the state-run news,
Robert Conquest: Garland for a Propagandist
The Commissar of Bray: Robert Conquest satirises Communist hackery
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps
The dedication at the front of Graham and Hugh Greene’s famous anthology of espionage literature, The Spy’s Bedside Book (1957), reads: “To the immortal memory of William le Queux and John Buchan”.