America
High life
I’ve stayed far away from the new barbarians with their choppers, tank-like cars, home theatres on board, and fridge-shaped super…
His dark materials
Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…
His dark materials
Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…
China syndrome
Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…
Beth Ditto: Fake Sugar
Boy is she fat, and getting fatter. I realise this is something we’re not meant to mention when talking about…
The monkey-brained case for Donald Trump
A few years ago I was asked to speak at a conference in New York. ‘Where would be the best…
Even fruitcakes and fascists are more popular than the flaccid centre
A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the…
The view from New York tells me that Trump can win it
New York I have never seen anything like it. If Adolf Hitler were running for president, he would match…
Long may we Brits laugh at our absurd demagogues
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke warned that ‘pure democracy’ was as dangerous as absolute monarchy. ‘Of…
Millepied’s final spring programme for the Paris Opera Ballet is brazenly American
Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a…
Catherine Tate’s talents are wasted on this meandering musical about nuclear fallout
Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would…
Jean Genet’s fascinating play, The Maids, is botched at Trafalgar Studios
The Maids is a fascinating document. Written in 1947, Jean Genet’s drama portrays a pair of serving girls who enact…
Donald Trump's angry America
Welcome to Trump’s America, where greed is great and viciousness beautiful
America would never join anything like the EU. Yet they urge us to stay
America is urging Britain to stay in the European Union. But it would never dream of joining a comparable organisation
I admired it - but also desperately wanted it to end: The Revenant reviewed
The Revenant is a survival-against-the-odds film that so puts Leonardo DiCaprio through it I bet he was thinking, ‘I wish…
What I learned from arguing about gun control with my Texan uncle
Whenever there’s another mass shooting in America, like the massacre in San Bernardino last month, I think immediately of my…
Could a change of body language make a difference to American policing?
One of the most shocking items of recent news has been the bald statistic that the number of people shot…
The best - and worst - podcasts
My resolution this New Year is to get to grips with podcasts, to brace up and embrace this new aural…
It is time to join the fight against IS in Syria
The Islamic State is as monstrous an enemy as we have seen in recent history. It crucifies and decapitates its…
I’ve never thought much of John Lennon’s music – until now
It’s probably blasphemous to admit that I’ve never thought very much of John Lennon’s music. Common sense tells me it…
Robert Peston has got it all wrong about ties —viewers want broadcasters to look humbly respectful
When Robert Peston, the economics editor of the BBC, interviewed George Osborne on television in an open-necked shirt with collar…
It will tear your heart out: 99 Homes reviewed
99 Homes is an American drama about house repossession. Bummer, you might think, but here is what you don’t yet…
Niall Ferguson's biography of Henry Kissinger is a masterpiece
I have met Dr Kissinger, properly, only three times. First, in Cairo, in 1980, when, as a junior diplomat escorting…
I lived next to St Paul’s Cathedral as a baby in 1940 – it’s a miracle I am alive
While the Germans were raining bombs on London during the second world war, the architects’ department of London County Council…
Hirohito, MacArthur and other villains
The history of ‘great events’, Voltaire wrote, is ‘hardly more than the history of crimes’. Physically, the war in Asia…
