Review

FLORENCE HALLETT reports on a new exhibition with a remarkably topical theme – the totemic importance of touch in art and the human condition. From the wall of the Cueva de Las Manos – a cave in Santa Cruz, southern Argentina – handprints reach out to us across the millennia. At 9,000-13,000 years old, they are by no means the oldest […]

A new book by writer and broadcaster David Baddiel gets right to the heart of anti-Semitism, and why it has taken such a hold on the left. Smear. Bundled up in that single syllable are years of pain and anger felt by Jewish people who have failed to persuade the putative anti-racist movement that we know […]

Historian JAMES HAWES reviews Gavin Esler’s new book foretelling the imminent end of the UK. Things that have been a long time coming, finally come suddenly. And the end of the UK has been a long time coming. The band may still be playing, but it is playing on the deck of the Titanic: we […]

BILL BORROWS on a new book about the men at the centre of the Swinging Sixties. There was a knock at the door of 24 Chapel Street, Belgravia, an elegant four-storey Georgian house a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace and, less than three months earlier, the venue for the launch of The Beatles’ eighth […]

Tim Walker reviews A Christmas Carol, streaming from the Charles Dickens Museum on December 31 I missed catching up with old friends over Christmas, not least Scrooge and Dick Whittington. I’d written the latter gentleman’s name in my diary half-heartedly as I knew there was a fair chance the reunion wasn’t going to happen. Sure enough, when […]

Theatre critic TIM WALKER reviews a new production of Jack and the Beanstalk, which can be viewed at selected cinemas and online Heaven only knows what Peter Duncan’s neighbours made of what they saw going on in his garden in recent months. The former Blue Peter star got it into his head to make a Christmas panto that […]

‘A Very Expensive Poison’ is about as guttural and stereotypical as six straight shots of vodka, writes TIM WALKER Tom Brooke as Alexander Litvinenko and MyAnna Buring as Marina in A Very Expensive Poison – Credit: Archant With colour- and even gender-blind casting now commonplace in the world of the theatre, I’m not sure if […]