Most governments are at some point relaunched, often more than once. This is usually because a crisis hits—such as the Falklands War in 1982, Black Wednesday in 1992, the Iraq War in 2003, the Brexit ...

Most foreign journalists are barred by Israel from entering Gaza. Most, but not all. In October 2024, the right-wing polemicist Douglas Murray was given exclusive access to the Tel al-Sultan district ...

Keir Starmer’s promise that Labour will build 300,000 homes in each of the next five years has been met with some scepticism. The last time the United Kingdom managed to build more than that number of ...

A lot of television at this time of year is pretty cloying. It’s not that I don’t have time for any of that: I’ll watch the Gavin & Stacey finale, catch half an episode of Call the Midwife over my mum ...

There is a feeling of utter randomness to The Position of Spoons: and Other Intimacies, Deborah Levy’s new collection of nonfiction writing. In a world of pithy blurbs—and the publishing industry’s ...

From Shakespeare’s sonnets and Donne’s songs (“Tell me where all past times are”) to Wordsworth and Eliot (“All time is unredeemable”), poets have gone in search of lost time. It was this theme—one of ...

How did the US come to this? James Shapiro’s The Playbook doesn’t contain all the answers—but, in its telling of the struggle over a New Deal theatre programme in the 1930s, it does have some. Here, ...

Our greatest novelists shouldn’t have to go through near-death experiences to publish brilliant nonfiction, but perhaps—in a perverse way—we should be glad that both Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi ...

The best idea ever—bar none—is that games are really important, actually. And that idea will be embedded in your head after reading Kelly Clancy’s Playing with Reality. Clancy, a neuroscientist, ...

In my mother’s study, after my father died, we found his unopened Christmas presents in a forlorn pile, not far from the ugly chair in which, ill or well, he had always sat, and a low table on which ...

Few contemporary novelists are such beautiful prose stylists as Alan Hollinghurst. Fewer still have produced a body of work so unfailingly pleasurable to read. To make these claims is to parrot many ...

Al Pacino has a reputation for difficulty. He clashed with director Norman Jewison on And Justice for All (1979) after he asked for a reshoot of the film’s climactic courtroom scene. He did the same ...