Rehabilitation of a great stylist
Christopher Bray thinks Roth’s “novelist’s autobiography” is one of his most fizzing examinations of the stories that construct our various selves
Gloriously bad company
Do we really need another biography about Francis Bacon? The answer is emphatically yes, says Christopher Bray
Peculiar world of a singular talent
Highsmith was a great writer, with a moral vision bracing enough to clarify the terrors of the twentieth century
Bedtime reading for boomers
You will search in vain for a new life of any rocker who made his name after the advent of punk
Derrida deconstructed
Derrida’s prose, which stops being turgid only in order to be turbid, is utterly incomprehensible
Time flies, relatively speaking
The older you are, the quicker you count out a minute
An incomplete history of the Swinging Sixties
Any history of the 1960s that neglects mass culture is not to be taken entirely seriously
The jokes must go on
Christopher Bray reviews Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen
Mass-goer who glorified mass production
Christopher Bray reviews Warhol by Blake Gopnik
Insight of a prolix pluralist
Christopher Bray reviews The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin by Johnny Lyons
What’s the EU really trying to do with the Protocol?
Brussels isn’t living up to the commitments it made
The “right wing” case for the NHS
Lincoln Allison lays bare the strictly non-socialist argument for the NHS
Building the Museum of Brexit
‘The story of Brexit will not get a fair hearing unless we create that space for ourselves’ — Gawain Towler on the plan to make the Museum of Brexit a reality
A QC’s truth
Jolyon Maugham and Professor Lavery are misrepresenting the Bell v Tavistock case
An American in search of the English national character
Daniel Pipes’s quest to understand the English national character leaves him none the wiser
Shutting up the unspeakable is still a bad idea
The scientific method remains dissent and criticism, even for Lockdowns
Hopkins and Oldman: The very best of British actors
Following the recent Oscar nod for Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman, Alexander Larman looks at other parallels between the two thespians
Thailand’s monarchy in crisis
Following the recent imprisonment of an activist for ‘disrespecting the monarchy’, James Snell looks at how Thailand’s current king differs from his predecessor
You can’t ‘level up’ Oxbridge
It is high time we ally elite education, irrespective of background, with the service of the public good
How neutral is “Full Fact”?
Sometimes it’s hard to get anyone right