cultural snow

A few nights ago, I was in the edifice that I still insist on calling the National Film Theatre, where I picked up a leaflet claiming to be The Insiders’ Guide to the BFI London Film Festival.

Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” f…

In common with anyone else too old to seriously contemplate a mid-life crisis, I often find myself grumbling at BBC radio’s faintly risible efforts to lure a younger audience.

It’s been many decades since I set foot in a nightclub but this description, from Boy Parts by Eliza Clark, of people dancing to the Smiths sounds painfully familiar: I know I’m white, but there’s just a lot of white people White People-ing in a very small

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting: A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon.

Donald Trump has been getting all in a tizzy about journalists suggesting that his memories of 9/11 and what he was doing that day are a wee bit confused.

Another name that could have found a place in the works of Pynchon or Vonnegut – the journalist Garrison Lovely.

Not a little consternation a few days ago when contestants on BBC1’s evergreen quiz show Pointless were tasked with identifying a Shakespeare play with ‘W’ or ‘S’ in the titles and half of them couldn’t manage it.

The news that Russia has started targeting attacks on Ukraine’s printing presses and publishing companies – just as the school year is about to begin – should surprise nobody.

It’s all starting to feel a bit 2016 again, as on successive days we have to process the deaths of Dolly Parton, Tim Curry and Yayoi Kusama, three people who in their own very different ways, channelled their art as much into being themselves as into doing

A very odd article in The Guardian, about TV shows that the writers can no longer bear to watch.

From Michael Bracewell’s novella The Smiths, in which the narrator describes first hearing ‘Hand in Glove’: And was there some stratum of attitude, somewhere in the lower register, that brought to mind the interior monologue of a drily cynical supply teac…

I wrote a few months ago about my disappointment when viewing the Northern Lights, and becoming aware that no reality could match the psychedelic strangeness of the photos.

It’s been a while since I’ve celebrated the glory of real names that sound as if they were invented by Thomas Pynchon or Kurt Vonnegut, and then two come along at once.

In the wake of Bill Oddie’s death, there’s been much musing about how the show for which he’ll be best remembered, The Goodies, has generally been seen as less significant, less groundbreaking, less serious (if a comedy show can be serious) and above all…

I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who…

I’ve said before that the loudest voices in the room when it comes to the erosion of what might loosely be known as Western culture are those who never showed the slightest interest in celebrating it.

There has been some talk, even from those unsympathetic to Nigel Farage, that the candidacy of Count Binface, the highest-profile opponent to the Reform leader in the upcoming Clacton by-election, is somehow unserious and indicates something flawed in the…

I am slightly baffled by the objections raised by Southwark Council to Steven Thorpe’s decision to place a chunk of the Berlin Wall in his garden, not least the observation that it presents an “oppressive sense of enclosure and stark industrial appearance…

I know the best thing would to be ignore him, but two recent items must be flagged up.

The problem with AI is not just the times it gets things wrong, it’s the times it gets them crass and banal.

Brexit was the inevitability that nobody (including a number of its high-profile supporters, apparently) saw coming.

I was recently wittering about how our (my?)

Sometimes it’s hard to quantify what precisely got lost as the golden age of blogging was superseded by the implacable progress of social media.

It’s funny to think that in the early years of this blog, when I discussed authenticity, it was usually in strictly analogue terms, about fake Asias and fake Europes, fake beaches, Ernie Wise’s fake hair (which was in fact a fake of a fake).

Matt Chorley of the BBC has made a mistake.

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the 20th or any other century, the narrator, the pianist Ryder, is unreliable but we never really find out why.

I’ve been very lucky with teachers.

Yesterday I had a spare half-hour in class after prepositions and obligations and stuff and asked the students whether we are entering a post-literate age and, if so, who or what is to blame and a charming 18-year-old Slovakian suggested that the whole th…

I am not in the least surprised that the Guardian’s ragebaity list of 100 best novels failed to include my own favourite, Vile Bodies.

I just unearthed an article I wrote for Prospect in 2009, in which I argued that we were living through an age of fleeting plausibility, where cool gimmicks like CGI offered us things that might just possibly be real, and we enjoyed them on that basis, un…