Eligible Bachelors October 07, 2024
The English writer Rupert Croft-Cooke was onto something when he observed in 1963 that “we are one of the world’s most homosexual races.” My own sense is not that the British are more prone to homosexuality than other peoples but rather that gay men ...
Herd Immunity August 29, 2024
The ordeal is over. Reader, whatever you do with your four-thousand weeks on this plane of absurdity, do not drain four precious weeks in putting a roof over your head in London.This death march, or 'my struggle' as the publishers have cannily titled...
PJ Harvey’s Songs of England August 26, 2024
Opening her late-summer set in Gunnersbury Park, west London, PJ Harvey sang: “Wyman, am I worthy?/Speak your wordle to me.” A pink haze had settled across the sky just before she appeared onstage to the sound of birdsong, church bells, and electroni...
Bonfire of the Humanities August 12, 2024
“I really think that you should read Caledonian Road,” a colleague advised me, soon after the publication of Andrew O’Hagan’s state-of-the-nation novel. “The main character is actually a member of this department.” It sounded more like a warning than...
Bruce Springsteen’s Tour de Force August 12, 2024
LONDON—I have seen rock ‘n’ roll’s past, and its name is still Bruce Springsteen. I have seen Springsteen half a dozen times over five decades, indoors and outdoors, with and without the E Street Band, from the rafters and from the side of the stage....
On Edna O'Brien August 12, 2024
Edna O’Brien, whose Country Girls trilogy was burned on its arrival in 1960, is dead at 93, having died ‘peacefully’ after a long illness. The Country Girls books tell of a girl leaving rural Ireland for school, then Dublin, then London. It’s worth r...
Why Men Are ‘Rawdogging’ Flights June 25, 2024
Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on ...
The Taylor Swift Economy Has Overtaken London June 25, 2024
Taylor Swift is in London. Even the least culturally clued-in person could not have failed to notice. The city is full of people in “Eras” merch, and social media is awash in concert footage from the tour dates at Wembley Stadium: Travis Kelce donnin...
How Gabriel Smith Wrote the Book of the Summer June 19, 2024
Gabriel Smith, the 28-year-old London-based novelist whose Brat is earmarked as one of the literary events of the summer—the summer of brat, if you will—is comfortable letting things bleed. The book, which is published by Penguin in North America and...
Kate Winslet Reigns June 13, 2024
In 2022, Kate Winslet went to the London home of director Stephen Frears to discuss HBO’s political satire “The Regime.”She’d been cast in the role of Elena Vernham, a narcissistic European autocrat, and Frears had been pinpointed by the production a...
The Best New Books to Read in Summer 2024 June 11, 2024
Summer 2024 is a time for romance novels. But also fantasy books. And literary fiction. And thrillers. Really, there should be no strict parameters around what makes the best “summer book,” or even what qualifies as a “beach read.” The last time I wa...
Family, Friendship, and Irony June 07, 2024
In Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance, the French writer Alain describes his forthcoming book. “It’s really about irony. How ironic life can be,” he says. “How we’re ruled by chance and coincidence. And what a farce life is—a black farce.”This could descri...
The Summer Box Office Crisis June 06, 2024
Within minutes of the actors strike ending on Nov. 9, Ryan Reynolds was making plans to get back to London and the set of Deadpool & Wolverine, one of the many movies shut down in mid-July when the walkout commenced. He and director Shawn Levy were d...
‘Vagabonds’ Review: The Down and the Out March 08, 2024
Great cities are full of poor people, for great cities manufacture poverty along with wealth. Victorian England invented a new, industrial poverty. Its workshop was Manchester, the “Cottonopolis” where Friedrich Engels did the fieldwork for “The Cond...
Tate Modern’s Reimagining of Yoko Ono’s Oeuvre March 05, 2024
When I speak to Sean Lennon over the phone a few weeks before the opening of Tate Modern’s “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” he’s in his 91-year-old mother’s apartment in Manhattan, a few feet away from a piece of art that irrevocably changed the course...
On Adapting ‘American Psycho’ March 05, 2024
Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho was much reviled, much loathed when it was published in 1991. There was a big scandal and I was really surprised that in all the furor, no one said that the book was really funny. As well as being very violen...