Category: Interesting

Montague Rhodes James was the greatest writer of ghost stories in the English language. I think that greatness lies in his consistency. This might seem a small compliment, but it…

Montague Rhodes James was the greatest writer of ghost stories in the English language. I think that greatness lies in his consistency. This might seem a small compliment, but it…

I cannot recall the year now; I ought to be ashamed. But my grandfather had died in his back garden in Hackbridge on the southern edge of London. Grandma called…

On Monday, Jacob Coxon briefly became the most talked-about man in Silicon Valley. Resigning from his job as a researcher at Anthropic, he assailed his ex-employer in the bluntest of…

Fiona*, our new social worker, had checked the padlocked bolt on our garden-shed door; she had run her hand over our mattresses to make sure they were soft. Now she…

The Southbank Center has hosted many great cultural events over the years. In 1951, the Festival of Britain almost single-handedly dragged British art out of its postwar slump. In 1958,…

Romance fiction is the genre of masochism: it’s less about love than control, less about pleasure than pain. This is why Matthew Sweet calls his superb new life of Cartland…

It was an episode straight out of a hit narconovela (the subgenre of Latin-American telenovelas that feature gangland violence in addition to the usual raunchy romance). Nadia, an expectant mother,…

In The Wizard of the Kremlin, a movie whose most impressive achievement is making Russian history boring, Paul Dano plays a Kremlin PR hack tasked with building what Putin, played…

I owe Wendell Berry my life. Not literally, of course, but maybe in a deeper and more important sense, the life that I now lead. Considering myself truly blessed with…