The Critic Magazine

DONE DEALS CAN BECOME NO DEALS very quickly. One moment it was a done deal — on the front page of The Times, no less — that Lee Cain was going to become the prime minister’s chief of staff. The next moment, the former No 10 director of communications

Publisher & Co-Editor: Michael Mosbacher Co-Editor: Christopher Montgomery Executive Editor: Robert Low Art Director: Martin Colyer Political Editor: Graham Stewart Deputy Political Editor: David Scullion US Editor: Oliver Wiseman Production: Alexand

IF GUILT WAS MEASURED in bra sizes I’d be 38 GG. I am quite exceptionally guilty. Mea(des) culpa. Guilty of what? Well, just about everything. You name it. I am, after all, white, European, male and though not technically dead at the moment of writin

‘‘THE ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE runs through Texas,” enthused Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez on a get-out-the-vote zip through the southeast corner of the state two days before last month’s election. Like many predictions of a thumping D

HORROR STORIES about public debt are a commonplace. Spending other people’s money comes more easily to politicians than imposing extra taxes. The natural response to a sudden and unexpected emergency — such as that posed by the Covid-19 pandemic — is

IN 2019 RACHEL WHITEREAD was made Dame of the British Empire “for services to art”. Since her “art” consists in making casts of the interior of everyday objects (the underside of a chair, a room or, most famously, an entire about-to-be-demolished hou

WHY IS THE government so unwilling to tackle the problem of corporate fraud? Years pass and nothing is done. It’s almost as if ministers don’t want to see companies in the dock. As the law now stands, a company can be convicted of an economic crime i

THE OLD MAN LOOKS PAST MY SHOULDER and off into the distance. His face is smooth, the nose is beakishly angular and classically Greek. The eyes, which are almost expressionless, transmit an imperturbable patrician confidence, and they are shaded in d

IF NOT QUITE in the stratospheric class of Andrew Davies, to whom he has been known to refer as “my mentor”, Sandy Devereux has, over the past 30 years, carved out quite a career as the adaptor of “classic” novels for peak-time television. His versio

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO last month the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in Paris, ending the bitter Bosnian war. The general framework of the agreement was brokered during three weeks of negotiations at Wright-Patterson airbase in Ohio, thanks to a mix

BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, when I was studying politics at Leeds University, I had a lengthy reading list of dense, important books. But my favourite work, at best tangentially related to my course, was a tattered pamphlet called “Go Fourth and Multipl

• Arriving at a station in London recently, I noticed on the ground feet-shaped stickers suggesting that I (and everyone else, of course) kept two metres away from one another. It was not difficult to com ply because, during the second lockdown, ther

TO UNDERSTAND OUr current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of t

Although I hate everything that Piers Morgan stands for, I agreed to review his new book Wake Up to show that I am open-minded and willing to be challenged. My only condition was that I wouldn’t have to read it. Needless to say, it’s one of the worst

IT IS HARD TO SAY WHETHER the suburbs of Britain rejected contemporary architecture first or whether contemporary architecture rejected the suburbs. But by 1999, when Richard Rogers published Towards an Urban Renaissance, contemporary architecture, s

• A meme is an image or text that spreads virally among internet users. All art, Aristotle wrote, is mimesis, imitation, from mimos, "actor". The word meme comes from the same source, via the Greek muse of memory, Mneme. So the meme is to thought as

HERMAN GOERING is famous for supposedly having said, “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my revolver.” In fact, the quote originated elsewhere. It would have been surprising if the case were otherwise, since the Nazis, being Germans, could h

OVER THE PAST SIX YEARS, Penguin have been publishing their excellent Monarchs series in which a leading historian writes a 30,000-word book on a king or queen from Athelstan to Elizabeth II. There are now 45 of them (including David Horspool on Oliv

THE LITERARY CRITIC John Carey in 2000 published Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books. In it he warned of those who associate reading with “swank and false refinement” and argued for “pure reading-pleasure”. Crucially, fo

YOU COULD HARDLY IMAGINE a more fortuitous moment to publish a book on the politics of loneliness. Although Noreena Hertz began work on The Lonely Century long before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, the current crisis pulls together all the different stra

PERHAPS THE MOST salient piece of advice in this new guide to life as a twenty-first century male is contained in what James Innes-Smith, following Shakespeare’s much-quoted lines from As You Like It, correlates to the fourth stage of man’s journey f

IN 1638, THE ENGLISH travel writer and explorer John Josselyn heard that a merman had been sighted off New England. “There are many stranger things in the world,” he declared, “than there are to be seen between London and the Stanes [Staines].” Josse

THE ROMANO-GERMANIC museum in Cologne contains some exceptional examples of late-antique glassware. Two contrasting but complementary examples stand out. The most spectacular glass in the collection is a diatreta, or cage glass. The lower part of the

WHEN IT COMES TO cookbooks, it’s the hardest thing of all to write about simple food. Jane Grigson gave a recipe for cooking kippers which involved putting hot water on a kipper in a jug. Simple, but all you need. Elizabeth David’s Summer Cooking is

DIRT HAS A BAD NAME. What a shame that the UK publishers didn’t change the monosyllabic title of Bill Buford’s knotty, gripping memoir of restaurant kitchens in Lyon for British readers. In the great anthropologist Mary Douglas’s dictum, dirt is “mat

EVERY SO OFTEN one of the national restaurant critics will take a break from visiting the latest buzzy joint in Shoreditch to review a place where ordinary people go, like a Wetherspoons or a Harvester. It’s a great opportunity to shoot some fish in

THERE’S NO EASY WAY to break this to you, but next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of Don McLean’s “American Pie”. That’s right. Half a century since you first heard that interminable dirge about “the day the music died”. Go back the same dista

AS SOMEONE WHO LOVES nothing better than chuckling at the likes of Wimmin in Private Eye and Millie Tant in Viz, I am always on the lookout for new feminist parody. Which is why I love Titania McGrath so much. The parody Twitter account devised by th

THE TELEVISION PRESENTER Richard Osman — he of Pointless fame — must have wished that he had never gone anywhere near social media in the weeks following publication of his much-hyped debut novel. A similarly situated Graham Norton was lucky to get a

AROUND THE TURN of the century, I was approached by a London orchestra with a view to freshening up its repertoire. Having made a study of composers under the Soviet system, I proposed a series titled Other Russia, music of the greatest originality t

WHO SAYS OPERA has no socially useful purpose? Why, it is only a few years since a Miami judge decimated crime simply by promising to make felons sit through Rigoletto with him in his chambers. And piping Mozart into bus shelters here has proved mass

I NEVER HAD to have an opinion about the Falklands War because it was all over before I was ten months old, and however annoyingly precocious I was as a child, even I drew the line at articulating foreign policy in shrieks and burping. (Anyone tempte

AS THE AMERICAN ELECTION played itself out, the British Museum kept its eye on the Stars and Stripes too. In its case it was not the Biden-Trump endgame but a picture by the venerable American painter Jasper Johns. Flags I, (above, right) from 1973,

LOCKDOWN THEATRE BEGAN by streaming old productions and moved into the realm of some instant pop-up ones which looked a bit like watching a podcast being recorded or a Zoom call with actors rehearsing their lines. After a few months of forgettable an

A MOVIE ABOUT the creation myth of “the world’s greatest movie”, Citizen Kane, a love letter to the form of 1930s movies, and a cynical poison pen letter about Hollywood’s power brokers — David Fincher’s Mank is all of these and more. Released on Net

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, visitors to the Grand Canal could rejoice in a spectacle even stranger and more wonderful than the preposterous beauty of that great sweep of water which forms part of the imagination of the world. A floating glass furnace, an ini

I must declare an interest. Swinfen Hall hotel is in my constituency, just on the A38 heading into Lichfield. A venue for weddings (when weddings are allowed), family parties and discreet business meetings, the house was built in the eighteenth centu

ONCE UPON A TIME in Spain there was a little bull and his name was Ferdinand.” So begins the 1936 children’s classic about a toro bravo who prefers flowers to fighting. Ferdinand the Bull was an instant success, popular with every sandal-wearer and f

FOUR SOGGY BUMS, we sat in the lodge, squeezed together on a two-person sofa. Our waterproofs were soaked with rain on the outside and dripped with sweat within. By September, it was our routine. After a long day on the hill, we’d slump in front of t

THERE OFTEN SEEMS to be something oddly derisive, if not downright divisive, about national such-and-such days or this-and-that weeks, and the botanically themed of these calendrical interlopers are no exception. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for promo

THE EASY THING to say about cross-country runners is they are a warm and welcoming bunch, who offer encouragement to all new runners. That’s true but misses the point. You could also say that a cross-country race is as far from the slick, expensive w

CHRISTMAS, APPARENTLY, and I can’t even. I’m not talking everyone else’s can’t even: all this “Boohoo, Christmas is cancelled, life has lost all meaning” shtick. I’m talking, “Christ, really? We’re still doing this shit about some weird Palestinian c

BEING AN ANTIQUE DEALER is a wonderful job. Every day you wake up and think about acquiring new pieces and better understanding what you have already acquired. You can visit other dealers and talk about buying, you can go online, you can telephone or

ON HALLOWEEN something shocking happened in rail enthusiast circles that was nothing to do with ghouls or witches. The jolt took place not far from Waterloo Station in London, a couple of minutes’ stroll from the platforms: the last Ian Allan Book &

THE LATE ROBERT FISK was as close to a celebrity as it is possible to get for a foreign correspondent. I vividly remember the moment I met him after a lecture in Beirut in 2010: for a young journalist in the first few months of my career, it was almo