Civilisation
The shadow of the Sun King
‘It has been said that Louis XIV invented France and Napoleon made it. Like Napoleon 150 years later, Louis found a country in turmoil and determined to turn it into a functional, modern state’
Politics in a minor key
‘If Jacob Rees-Mogg is indeed a principled arch-eurosceptic, why did he vote both for and against Theresa May’s EU withdrawal deal? If he is so politically acute, why did his attempt to assassinate the previous party leader fail so miserably?’
The agony of being Sontag
‘If Susan Sontag had been a man, if she hadn’t had such a pungent, fascinating character, if she hadn’t had a nonstandard sexuality, would her works get her a biography as big as this one? Does she merit it?’
A conspiracy unmasked
‘Margaret Thatcher was a leader they had never wholly accepted; a radical, an outsider, a loner’
Ibsen perplexed
Why modernise old plays when their message is already topical?
Levelling the playing field
Questioning the status of history’s ‘most dangerous’ spy
A reckoning for justice
Thomas Grant’s “Court Number One” reveals the changing values of the society which the criminal justice system ultimately exists to enforce
Humanity on the move
‘An ominous development in the “unsettling” of Europe is the increasing restriction on what may be said about migration, and the increasingly strict policing of language’
Charlie Chaplin à la Française
Louis de Funès may be France’s most beloved actor. The choice tells us a lot about those who love him
Verbal warfare
State of the nation plays like 1980s-set Hansard now have to compete with extraordinary real life drama