‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

Until recently, few readers would have been familiar with the painter, cultural ambassador and memoirist Józef Czapski. Born in 1896 into a noble Polish family, Czapski was sucked early in his life ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ...

All swimming pools, however, deal in the unnatural. Southern California is the modern heartland of this glorious folly. Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), in which the diversion of water away from ...

It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

‘Do you hear voices?’ It’s not always wise to answer in the affirmative. In a famous experiment in 1973, the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan and seven other perfectly sane people requested ...

Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

Since 1993, the Bad Sex in Fiction Award has honoured the year’s most outstandingly awful scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel. Drawing attention to the poorly written, redundant, or ...