The scatalogical subversive
Magritte’s work is no more socially potent than dog-mess on a doorstep
Lessons from life
How the facts of Hannah Arendt’s life read like fiction
Television tome that needs tuning
The Magic Box is Rob Young’s impassioned, occasionally impenetrable, psycho-history of the TV of his youth
Tangled up in the myth of Dylan
Age hasn’t withered Dylan. He was always running towards it, arms open wide.
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
Most Read
The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
Grooming gangs and the truth
We should not give ammunition to deniers of the grooming gangs scandal
Babies need women
Leaving children with only men who are not their parents is foolish and dangerous
Can Russell T Davies write “terfs”?
In Tip Toe, Russell T Davies is more nuanced than one might expect — much to the dismay of gender ideologues
Farewell to a gentle jazz-lover
Scholarship trumps zealotry, particularly when it is veiled by modesty
Surrogacy is not a human right
Noble principles are being twisted to prop up an exploitative ideology
American crusades
Populism is susceptible to foreign lobbies and crusading delusions
Empire State Madrid
Can a stagnant Spain rediscover the future? Hope lies with its capital
All the single ladies
Instead of trying to persuade reluctant women into motherhood, policymakers should focus on helping enthusiastic parents have larger families
Playing by numbers
Attacking the Space:
Inside Rugby’s Tactical and Data
Revolution by Sam Larner
Why Mali matters
Terrorism is spiralling out of control in West Africa
Working with Woods
There have been too few honest explorations into the intrinsic link between woods and humans
Our new five-party system
First-past-the-post no longer means
an electoral carve-up between the
Tories and Labour, allowing “fringe”
parties real political influence
The revolt against the public
The establishment cannot accept ordinary citizens having power
Signal failure
Ministers love announcing transformative mega-projects, but millions of commuters would settle for an internet connection that actually works