So that was Christmas. And as “the lights come on at four, at the end of another year”, and the festive season sours into its familiar hangover of grey days and bloated bodies, we find ourselves ...

One—the?—highlight of 2024 was witnessing the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Ilan Volkov, perform 89-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s My Melodies for eight French horns and ...

I am reliably terrible at end of year lists. Ask me tomorrow, and my favourite record of the year might be wholly different to the list I would give you today, or yesterday, or next week. But on the ...

La Chimera made me think of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of Powell & Pressburger. Of how long it had been since I’d been sent on such a vagrant, enjoyable path at the movies. Italy in the early 1980s: Josh O ...

On 18 th June 1994, two members of the Ulster Volunteer Force dressed in boiler suits and balaclavas walked into a bar in Loughinisland, County Down and opened fire. Six people were killed. Nobody has ...

Each year, there is a prolonged and increasingly irritating debate as to whether certain films count as “Christmas movies” or not. There are the uncontroversial choices—Elf, Miracle On 34th Street, It ...

Time magazine and the Financial Times have both named Donald Trump their person of the year, but a better option might have been Gisèle Pelicot. This is the woman who, having discovered that her ...

The pen may not be mightier than the sword, but it still has the power to wound. How else to explain the extraordinary remarks of the former Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, this week in which he ...

This is a haunted house story with a difference. The set-up might sound familiar—a young writer, currently blocked, recently dumped and back in his childhood home having just buried his father—but ...

John Prescott, who died on 20th November at the age of 86, was not given to philosophy, nor to philosophers. In 2005, when the cerebral David Miliband was appointed as a minister in Prescott’s office ...

My news feed has been full of headlines about the end of the world. “Is war coming to Korea?” “Putin: Nukes in Ukraine?” Even: “Netanyahu may use THESE THREE WEAPONS to attack Iran’s nuclear ...

In 2013, Lauren Mayberry wrote a newspaper column titled “I will not accept online misogyny”. Her band, Chvrches, a synth-pop trio from Glasgow, was just taking off. As the frontwoman, Mayberry was on ...