Marxist-Leninist rule in Russia lasted 74 years, and in August 1991 it effectively collapsed in just three days: clear evidence of how hollowed out it had become. In the period that followed,... Read more »
Film critic, historian and author of more than 40 books, David Thomson is back with another three-hour free jazz solo on the subject of the movies, though it’s a performance delivered with... Read more »
Isaac Butler is limbering up for an event at Politics and Prose, an independent bookshop and venerable Washington institution, but still has time to explain his arm tattoos. They variously depict: a... Read more »
This massive collection of essays by 43 different authors, including seven lords, four baronesses, one dame and three knights of the realm, may be the nearest we will ever get to a... Read more »
It’s the year 2049 and Daniel Connelly is 75 years old. Eccentric and lonely after decades of self-imposed isolation, his existence is “spartan”, a “relentless searching, a yearning for pieces that fit... Read more »
How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised... Read more »
Museums are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Ignore the problems of the past and they’re criticised for being problematic. Rewrite their labels according to changing politics and they’re called... Read more »
‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles.” So observed Hungarian journalist George Mikes in How to Be an Alien (1946), one of the finest examples of a tradition in which... Read more »
You could take two outwardly contradictory lessons from the historian David Turner’s new book on disability in the UK. First, that alarmingly little has changed for disabled people since the beginning of... Read more »