Issue: December 2020
Pleasures of the plague year
Lisa Hilton welcomes the locals back to Venice and enjoys a spicy nod to the city’s vibrant past
Vintage volume: The Story of Wine
The story of wine is a glorious story which illuminates the topics of more conventional histories
Learning to love Big Brother
A contemporary political drama uses the double whammy of Covid and Brexit to reanimate older, primeval forces
Lessons of Bosnian war and peace
I’m still haunted by a murderous conflict the Western world ignored until it was too late
Wonderful call of the wild
Macdonald’s prose is full of resonance and beauty, apposite delicacy and memorable evocations, says Matthew Adams
His own best character
A new Netflix release has been trailed as a masterpiece, with myriad claims to Oscar recognition, says Christopher Silvester
Sandy Devereux
Smallscreen scriptwriter
Fishermen’s tails
Through history, Mermaids have been treated as more real than legendary, even by those who have had a reputation to uphold
Carving out a new genre
Digital theatre is now beginning to offer stalls-starved audiences the kind of quality work they would have queued to see live
Borderland: Europe’s Eastern faultline
Rising tensions over gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean are fuelled by Erdogan’s dream of expanding Turkey’s borders
Most Read
American strategy in Iran is wiser than it seems
President Trump’s intervention will leave the world safer than it was
Saint Nicola
Nicola Sturgeon wants sympathy for her husband’s crimes—but after years spent avoiding awkward questions, her latest reinvention may be the hardest sell yet.
The lonely death of Henry Nowak
We must draw lessons from a horrendous and disgraceful case
Rewatching the English
English identity has become too surreal and discomfiting to define
A failed war on fags
The black market has taken over the tobacco trade Down Under
Spirits, a seven-year-old and a death camp
Balancing the gap between what the narrator knows and what the reader does
Zurbarán on Freud’s couch
An acclaimed new exhibition is full of overwrought symbolism and compositional failures
Self’s the man
Will Self can be absurd and obnoxious — but also highly entertaining and insightful
What the Brits can learn from Ireland
A seriousness of intent, a sense of longevity and a feeling for history
Why a wealth tax would fail
Wealth taxes have been tested in various countries and have been abandoned for very good reasons
Critical briefing: home ownership headaches
Why more homes are not always good news for the ordinary buyer
Two faces of America
Copland: 3rd symphony, Walker 5th (LSO Live)
Manchesterism is dead in the water
Andy Burnham already appears to have abandoned hope for meaningful change
Reform’s reality gap
Behind the rhetoric of mass deportations, Reform UK’s numbers and logistics don’t yet add up
Parade of defeats
Armenia is a democracy tearing itself apart over who gets to define the soul of a nation
Antisemitism and the Islamic connection
Antisemitic sentiments in Islamic theology cannot be overlooked or obscured