politics
Gary Naylor
What am I, a philosophical if not political Marxist whose hero is Antonio Gramsci, doing in Harvey Nichols buying Comme des Garçons linen jackets, Church brogues and Mulberry shades? It’s 1987 and I do wear it well though…Chiara Atik’s comedy crosses the Atlantic bearing prizes and venom and could hardly have fetched up anywhere more suited than leafy Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre. A once Lib-Dem / Conservative marginal seat has swung decisively to the former and seems unlikely to swing back rightwards any time soon. In the programme, the playwright says she wants “to challenge us… to take a Read more ...
Heather Neill
The National Health Service was established 77 years ago this month. Resident doctors are about to strike for more pay, long waiting lists for hospital treatment and the scarcity of GP appointments continue to dog political conversation, while the need for reform of the system provides a constant background hum. The idea for a national health service free at the point of need was always ambitious and remains challenging, but the NHS has become a cross between a religion and a beloved – if problematic – family. And it still deserves to be celebrated as it is here, even ending with Read more ...
joe.muggs
I met Mark Stewart once. It was on a platform at Clapham Junction, I wouldn’t normally approach a famous person like that, but I felt I had to pay my respects. It turned out he was getting on my train – going down to Dorset to “visit his old Ma” – and we talked on and off down to Southampton. He was hilarious, half scholar and gentleman, half lively uncle at a family function loudly telling old-school “blue” jokes, all in the thickest West Country burr this side of The Wurzels. I was glad I had done the gauche thing, doubly so after he died in 2023. Where meeting your heroes can sometimes Read more ...
caspar.gomez
MONDAY 30th JUNE 2025“I think you’d better drive,” says Finetime, his face sallow, skull-sockets underscored by dark brown rings. He looks peaky.“Why?” I enquire. Sweat nodules down my face, my body, everywhere. So saline-intense it leaves powdery white steaks.“My eyes,” he replies, “They’re wobbling about.”We pull over in Cannards Grave, a Somerset hamlet named for a thieving 17th century publican hanged here. Every third car passing contains battered detritus from the annual Worthy Farm pilgrimage.“You don’t look too good yourself,” says Finetime.“I’ll be fine.”But will I? Inside of my head Read more ...
joe.muggs
One of the great untold stories of the past decade is just how potent a cultural force R&B has been. It might not have had the wild musical innovation it did in the 2000s when the likes of Neptunes, Missy Elliot, Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins reigned supreme as producers – but through the 2010s and ‘20s, it has established a whole set of performers who are able to exhibit extreme range in subject matter, style and seriousness, held together with force of artistic personality.Post-Lemonade Beyoncé tends to absorb the majority of critical attention, but Kehlani, Jhene Aiko, Tinashe, SZA, H.E Read more ...
Gary Naylor
The safe transfer of power in post-war Western democracies was once a given. The homely Pickfords Removals van outside Number Ten, a crestfallen now ex-PM and family mooching about, for once trying not to be on camera, it's a tabloid front page cliché. Or the pomp and circumstance on Capitol Hill, cold, crowded and celebratory, a rebuke to the slab-faced gerontocracy, back yet again to survey Moscow’s Red Square parade.Shakespeare knew that such displays concealed dramas both political and personal and poured that knowledge (and a whole lot more) into Hamlet, state and court disintegrating Read more ...
Gary Naylor
There was a time when the only daytime TV (ex-weekends and ex-Wimbledon fortnight) comprised the annual party conferences and the Trade Union Congress. A seemingly endless parade of indistinguishable middle-aged balding white men, with Barbara Castle’s fiery redhead and Margaret Thatcher’s immovable blonde hairdo the only relief, would grab 15 minutes of fame speechifying on the minutiae of policy, some puffing on pipes, some on full-strength Capstans. It was parochial, boring and almost always of no consequence a week or so later, but I rather miss those days… If you do (and even if you don’ Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
The reporting of Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was shot dead in her Moscow apartment building in 2006 – on Vladimir Putin’s birthday, a deranged gift from his loyal security services – is perhaps the nearest thing we have to a full diagnosis of the horrifying corruption and brutality of Russia under his governance.Some of the events depicted in Words of War happened over a quarter of century ago when, as Yeltsin’s Prime Minister, Putin started a war in Chechnya on the same false pretext of anti-terrrorism that now masks his real intentions in Ukraine. However, as Politkovskaya, who Read more ...
Gary Naylor
“Don’t put your co-artistic director on the stage, Mrs Harvey,” as Noel Coward once (almost) sang. Tamara Harvey took no heed and Edward II sees her RSC compadre, Daniel Evans (pictured below, kneeling centre), back on stage after 14 years and in the title role to boot. In Daniel Raggett’s stripped back, helter-skelter, 100 minutes version of Christopher Marlowe’s sex, power and violence fest, Evans has certainly jumped in at the deep end (literally so at one point, which you won’t miss!). The noblemen of England disapprove of the king’s flamboyant "friend", Gaveston (Eloka Ivo, blessed Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Matt Forde gives a warning: “Don’t heckle the disabled – that’s a hate crime.” What an opener for his latest touring show, The End of an Era, which I saw at the Oxford Glee Club. To explain: in 2023 the back pain that Forde thought was sciatica turned out to be spinal cancer. Major surgery that included severing nerves in his nether regions followed, and post-surgery he now uses a stoma bag and self-catheterises. Thankfully Forde has recovered.He mines a slew of jokes here – mostly at the expense of his dignity – and the natural born comic looks on the bright side, as the very good poo Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The railways that we built in India may be well known, but I bet you’ve never heard of the Customs Line, a hedge that stretched 2,500 miles across the subcontinent all the way from the River Indus to the border between Madras and Bengal – the distance between London and Istanbul. Comparable in scale to the great Wall of China, this 40-foot high barrier was created to prevent the smuggling of salt.Before the advent of refrigeration, salt played a crucial role in preserving food. Taxing a substance so essential for survival was a sure way of getting rich and the British East India Company was Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It seems that esteemed former US President George Mullen is subsiding gently into retirement on his luxurious country estate, with a publishing contract for his memoirs if he can ever manage to knuckle down and write them, when fate throws a curve-ball.Without warning, the USA suffers a total blackout of power, communications and computer systems. The resulting chaos in air, road and rail transport, not to mention medical facilities, causes thousands of casualties, and nobody has a clue how it happened.This blackout only lasted a mere 60 seconds, but the perpetrators have sent out ominous Read more ...