The wonder of Jon Pertwee and his frilly shirt
When a friend asked if I wanted anything for Christmas I took a deep breath and replied: ‘Well, maybe I…
Septuagenarians behaving badly: Stockholm, by Noa Yedlin, reviewed
Four elderly people conspire, for different reasons, to keep the death of their friend a secret until he’s safely awarded the expected Nobel Prize for Economics
Has Germany finally shaken off its dark past?
‘When it comes to helping others, we are the world champions’, one politician declared in 2015. But Merkel’s welcome to immigrants was pragmatic – and anti-Semitism is on the rise again
How dangerous is the Sunni-Shia schism?
What unites the two groups is more fundamental than what divides them, says Barnaby Rogerson, and the more serious conflict among Muslims concerns ethnicity and language
What Shakespeare meant to the Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf’s mind was ‘agape & red & hot’ when reading him, and he was an everyday companion to most of the Group – but what they couldn’t bear was to see the plays acted
Dark days in Wales: Of Talons and Teeth, by Niall Griffiths, reviewed
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution a mountain is being hollowed out for mining, and everyone is covered in mud or worse in this memorable and highly original novel
Why were masters of the occult respected but witches burnt?
Anthony Grafton discusses five celebrated scholars, beginning with Dr Faustus, who separated ‘good’ magic from ‘bad’ in their studies of alchemy, astrology and conjuration
Must we live in perpetual fear of being named and shamed?
Current wars, Brexit and Trumpism have sucked us into a vortex of outrage and disgrace, says David Keen – while advertisers make us feel guilty for being too fat or just poor
Why are the Japanese so obsessed with the cute?
Some see it as a way of appearing harmless after the second world war – but an infantile delight in frolicking animals dates back to at least the 12th century
