Books
Who let the dons out?
Leave literary reviews to reviewers rather than score-settling academics
Artists shaped by war
Practically all the artists in the book are traumatised in one way or another, and all experienced war
Intellectual Red Bull
László Földényi’s essays are a collection that will leave you feeling sharp and more cultured, says Tibor Fischer
Satire needs to find new targets
There are still plenty of institutions worth mocking
From Brick Lane to Brixton
Stoddard Martin delves into a world beyond police and courtroom, with its own code of right and wrong, in Gerald Jacobs’s Pomeranski
Super Thursday
The busiest day of the publishing calendar offers hope for some, but ruin for many
Dining out, dying out
Alexander Larman on William Sitwell’s luxurious history of eating out
An incomplete history of the Swinging Sixties
Any history of the 1960s that neglects mass culture is not to be taken entirely seriously
Melancholy of obsolete futures
Alexander Adams on Soviet Brutalism and where to read about it
A flawed analysis on the rise of transnational authoritarianism
György Schöpflin on Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy
Fox’s real strategy
Column inches, not mayoral success, is the real victory of Laurence Fox’s political campaign
Public Enemy Number whatever
Frederic Raphael defends his friend, the writer Joseph Epstein, latest victim of America’s cancel culture for daring to mock Jill Biden’s doctorate
Radio cashes in on theatre’s loss
Radio drama is prone to over-signalling regional differences, says Anne McElvoy
Super hypocrites
Spare us the sentimental tosh about working-class sport, tradition and community
Post-colonial bad jokes
The whole history of the West is — to confound the simplicities of the woke — one gigantic act of “cultural appropriation”
Why are so many actors and filmmakers being cancelled?
From Kevin Spacey to Armie Hammer, why are those in Hollywood facing the axe of cancel culture more than ever before?
Why has a smoothie brand publicly cancelled a pensioner?
Innocent Drinks has outed itself as latest brand to join the ranks of the virtue-signalling mob
The mystery of the folded dragon
Michael Prodger recounts the tale of Hergé’s drawing for the cover of the Tintin instalment: The Blue Lotus
BBC iPlayer’s liberal conspiracy theory
Adam Curtis’s six-part history of the modern imagination is an obituary for serious or even semi-serious television
Armin Laschet, Germany’s next Chancellor: Pro-China, Pro-Putin, Pro-Assad?
As China rises and Russia rattles its sabre, the Germans will hope that the younger generation have as much ease learning Mandarin as Merkel’s generation did English