This summer, when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president, the Big News Story briefly overlapped with the Big Culture Story: Brat summer. My social feed was flooded ...

“I’m famous but not quite.” Of all the lyrics from Charli XCX’s 2024 album Brat, this is the one that has turned out to be the least true. Previously a “cult classic”, well known enough to be ...

I stood in front of Mother with Two Children, a bronze sculpture crafted by the German artist Käthe Kollwitz, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I stood there for a long time, gazing. I wanted ...

So that was Christmas. And as “the lights come on at four, at the end of another year”, and the festive season sours into its familiar hangover of grey days and bloated bodies, we find ourselves ...

John Prescott, who died on 20th November at the age of 86, was not given to philosophy, nor to philosophers. In 2005, when the cerebral David Miliband was appointed as a minister in Prescott’s office ...

Slick, gun-metal TV from Sky, following the titular Jackal, a notorious international assassin who specialises in using elaborate disguises to get close to his targets. It’s based on the 1971 thriller ...

One—the?—highlight of 2024 was witnessing the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Ilan Volkov, perform 89-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s My Melodies for eight French horns and ...

I am reliably terrible at end of year lists. Ask me tomorrow, and my favourite record of the year might be wholly different to the list I would give you today, or yesterday, or next week. But on the ...

La Chimera made me think of Orpheus and Eurydice. Of Powell & Pressburger. Of how long it had been since I’d been sent on such a vagrant, enjoyable path at the movies. Italy in the early 1980s: Josh O ...

This is a haunted house story with a difference. The set-up might sound familiar—a young writer, currently blocked, recently dumped and back in his childhood home having just buried his father—but ...

In 2013, Lauren Mayberry wrote a newspaper column titled “I will not accept online misogyny”. Her band, Chvrches, a synth-pop trio from Glasgow, was just taking off. As the frontwoman, Mayberry was on ...

My news feed has been full of headlines about the end of the world. “Is war coming to Korea?” “Putin: Nukes in Ukraine?” Even: “Netanyahu may use THESE THREE WEAPONS to attack Iran’s nuclear ...