Just before Christmas a couple of thieves broke into the underground car park in a block of flats in north London and helped themselves to quite a few bikes. Around the same time a frail 77-year-old ...

To govern is to choose and last month we saw some very different choices being made by political leaders in the UK. In a film studio outside London, Keir Starmer unveiled his “plan for change”, with a ...

“The usual?”—the two words any aspiring regular longs to hear, especially in London (or indeed any large city). Whether they’re uttered by your local pub’s landlord or that hot barista you flirt with ...

When I first went to Paris in 2017, I was charmed by the architecture, the Seine and the pastries. The city was alive with the stories of Alexandre Dumas and his son, as well as the myriad of ...

How should we die? Who chooses when life ends? Is a “good death” possible? Such questions may seem ill-timed. What choice had the innocent dead in the wars in Ukraine, Palestine and around the world, ...

“I’m famous but not quite.” Of all the lyrics from Charli XCX’s 2024 album Brat, this is the one that has turned out to be the least true. Previously a “cult classic”, well known enough to be ...

This summer, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president, the Big News Story briefly overlapped with the Big Culture Story: Brat summer. My social feed was flooded ...

I stood in front of Mother with Two Children, a bronze sculpture crafted by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I stood there for a long time, gazing. I wanted ...

Slick, gun-metal TV from Sky, following the titular Jackal, a notorious international assassin who specialises in using elaborate disguises to get close to his targets. It’s based on the 1971 thriller ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...