Christopher Bray
Beat that
“Half a century since their break-up, the Fab Four grimly reaped to the tiresome two, the Beatles go on. Documentaries and dramas continue to be made, interviews are bigged-up, and last year, as so often, the Beatles made the top 10”
Musical gifts of a steppe son
Irving Berlin’s life was packed with incident
What was she thinking?
“Though de Beauvoir and Sartre never tied the knot, their relationship, with its jealousies and enmities and silent rages, looks like the worst kind of marriage”
Tidying up the trivial
Jonathan Rée’s history of philosophy is way too long but worth sticking with for the connections it makes across whole networks of thought
Will the green agenda be killed off by the pandemic?
‘Will the green agenda be killed off by the longer-term coronavirus recovery? Or might the closure of so much business, and the cleaner air that results from planes not flying and factories not working, give us extra years to gain control of our environment?’
Why T.S. Eliot still matters
His contemporaries’ reputations have diminished. But Eliot’s has grown: he is the poet who shows us what can be saved from the ruins
Music’s in the house
Rappers have found a role in lockdown: chronicling coronavirus with topical tunes. Most people, though, are rushing to the safety of the past