Biography
Arnold Leverett: Veteran Playwright
If the theatres staging his work are getting smaller, the list of his celebrity admirers is still extensive
The lost world of Stefan Zweig
A new book offers a flawed but insightful perspective on the life of an elegist of civilisation
Writing lives
The life story of the biography, from Victorian glorification to Bloomsbury boldness to contemporary obliquity
Eventful afterlife of a visionary genius
Unexpected bit players in Friedrich’s story set this endeavour apart from your average art biography
The restless life of a very bourgeois rebel
Gauguin was not an artist who lent himself to categorisation
Cardinal win
Conclave is a political drama and a closed-room mystery rolled into one
A beguiling star who loved melodrama
Taylor’s hunger for money, flashy gizmos and flashier gewgaws found its echo in Burton’s need to forsake the classics
Confessions of a left-wing Pope
Life: My Story Through History by Pope Francis with Fabio Marchese Ragona
Iain Banks: a double life
His disturbing debut, The Wasp Factory, is being reissued this year
Why there has been no Street life
G.E. Street built or restored 113 churches for the Oxford diocese alone
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The martyrdom of Young Bob
On ebbing power of the political influencer
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
Stop ignoring the Islamisation of our democracy
The British state is bending to Islamism, not attempting to defeat it
Why has Keir Starmer been so unpopular?
He was the perfect embodiment of a failing system
Britain needs a moral core
The UK’s greatest vulnerability isn’t its weakened military but its lack of spiritual depth
Has the arts sector learned nothing?
Tripling down on identity politics and censoriousness would be fatal
The simple joy of giallo
Giallo films made for glorious Italian escapism
Beyond Carmen
Georges Bizet: The piano works (Hyperion)
Dignified design for the people
A book that asks all the right questions but hasn’t thought through all the answers
Green eggs and flam
A fine way to make herbes omelette
Itamar Ben-Gvir, heel
The Israeli demagogue is a bleak but interesting model of a modern politician
Stop saying sectarianism
Britain’s emerging politics are not really sectarian at all, but the result of neo-communal fragmentation
Killing the bill
Parliament has not approved assisted suicide — but the fight to revive it has already begun.
AI, religion and AI religion
Pope Leo is right to push back against the prophets of AI supremacy and AI doom
The case for vapes
Arguments for prohibitionism disappear in a cloud of vapour