The dark history of dance marathons
Stuart Jeffries on the dark history of dance marathons
Skyscraper squats and a lesson from India: the future of British architecture
Squatting, gutting and retrofitting – and a lesson from India: Stuart Jeffries looks at the future of British architecture
The guileful, soulful art of Khadija Saye
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
We all need to be let alone —not just Greta Garbo
‘You’re never alone with a Strand,’ went the misbegotten advertisement for a new cigarette in 1959. What the copywriter didn’t…
Radio 4's new H.P. Lovecraft adaptation will give you the chills
Of all the many things I’ve learned from the radio so far this decade, the most deranging is that the……
Enchanting – but don’t fall for the mummified rubber duck in the gift shop: Tutankhamun reviewed
Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return…
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
‘The only place I can’t get my plays on is Britain’: Sir Peter Brook interviewed
‘Everyone of us knows we deserve to be punished,’ says the frail old man before me in a hotel café.…
A dog’s life is infinitely superior to our own — so let’s embrace it
The Dominican friar Henry Suso was once carving Jesus’s name in his chest with a knife when he noticed a…
A cast of Antony Gormley? Or a pair of giant conkers? Gormley’s new show reviewed
While Sir Joshua Reynolds, on his plinth, was looking the other way, a little girl last Saturday morning was trying…
The poetry of sewers
‘Welcome,’ says our guide Stuart Bellehewe, with an imperious sweep of his arm, ‘to the cathedral of shit.’ Before us…
‘It could be a disaster’: Jim Broadbent talks to Stuart Jeffries about his latest role
‘I live completely anonymously,’ whispers Jim Broadbent down the phone from Lincolnshire. Nonsense, I counter. You’re one of the most…
Oddballs of English philosophy
Charles Kay Ogden once proposed that conversations would be conducted more efficiently if participants wore masks. Apart from confirming the…
Jane Haynes: the shrink who loves to break the rules
‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean…
The selfish shrink: life with Jacques Lacan
Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise…
Snatching victory from the jaws of defeat
Lord Woolton put it best: ‘Few people have succeeded in obtaining such a public demand for their promotion as the…
