The Critic Magazine

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ONCE BRITISH IMPERIAL AMBITION coloured the map of the globe pink. Now it must surely be largely green with envy, as there are so many things in Britain for the rest of the world to covet: our judges, our police, our BBC, our NHS, of course, and perh

Editor: Christopher Montgomery Deputy Editor: Graham Stewart Art Director: Martin Colyer Production Editor: Nick Pryer Online Editor: David Scullion Deputy Online Editor: Francesca Peacock Podcast Producer: Anna Price Digital production: Kittie Helmi

You will not find a better illustration of the decidedly unhinged anti-Israel obsessiveness of the Woke Left than this sentence appearing in Janine di Giovanni’s article (“Stateless in Gaza”, November 2021): “Even North Korea has slammed Israel for t

A PARTHEID IS A horrible word. The preferred pronunciation — “aparthate” — sums it up rather well. Afrikaans for “separateness”, it was the system that classified South Africans by race and enabled the minority white population to repress the majorit

We are staying at a hotel, because Bozzo wants to get to know the people he works with. They’re called MPs, and he says it’s their job to do what he says, but sometimes they think it’s not. So he says if they all go away together and have a few drink

THREE STATE SECURITY VANS pulled up outside the church. Officers got out and began pounding on the door, threatening to break it down. Inside the pastor knew they’d come. Church gatherings had just been made illegal in his country but pro-regime neig

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered.” I read these powerful words just the other day in a motivational s

WHAT HAS LED TO THE TRIUMPH OF WOKE? The suddenness and swiftness of the victory mean that we naturally turn for an explanation to the New Media — and to Twitter in particular. It’s Twitter which orchestrates the “pile-on” that delivers summary justi

MY LITERALLY maiden aunt was a censorious miserly bitch whose hobbies and interests included sly denigrations of her sister-in-law (my mother), sponging, confecting vinegary ketchup which took the enamel off teeth and insisting that her drab house wa

THE MOST FATEFUL WEEK OF MY LIFE BEGAN with my arrival in Kabul. It was April 2008 and my first time back in Afghanistan since 1963 when, as a teenager, I spent a month traversing the country from Herat to Kandahar and Kabul. Then, the ruggedly beaut

I saw the smoke banks on that October evening swirl slowly up over the Atlantic swell, and rise, and rise, until they had shredded into thinnest air, and lost themselves in the infinite blue of heaven. And with them rose the cloud which had hung over

WITH THREE SHOTS TO THE GUT, poor old Roj Blake is dead. Having, courtesy of the most spectacular of misunderstandings, just murdered the very man and former leader he’d long sought, Kerr Avon remains frozen to the spot. The rest of his ill-fated and

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; How some have been deposed; some slain in war, Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed; Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d And some were cance

‘‘PERHAPS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO HEAR the rehearsal”, said the voice from a house in Teplitzer Strasse. It was 14 November 1987, a gloomy Saturday in Berlin, and Simon Rattle was about to stand before the city’s fabled orchestra that evening for the first

FEW OF BRITAIN’S economic problems are more fundamental than the slide in the growth of productivity — output per person — in the last half century. In the 1960s productivity typically rose by more than three per cent a year, enabling output per head

FOR ME, IT WAS ALL DOWN TO what I saw on the box (which was a lot) — and this extended too to the arenas of action: a fantastic littering of such beautiful and extraordinary interiors, not one of which had I ever set foot in, nor even so much as glim

“Lions led by donkeys” is no doubt by now a cliché, but it came to my mind in a British hospital recently. The surgeon whom I consulted was excellent: he was friendly but with that air of quiet authority that arises from real mastery. I could not hav

THE ITALIAN ENGRAVER GIAMBATTISTA PIRANESI (1720 — 1778) is most famous for Imaginary Prisons, a series of dark, nightmarish images of the insides of colossal buildings [1] [2]. They contain stairways that lead nowhere, perspectives that contradict e

THIS OUTSTANDING NEW BIOGRAPHY of George III is timely. The first of the Hanoverians to identify as British was mocked, slandered and vilified during his lifetime and is still regularly cited in the American media as the epitome of tyranny. Over the

ANNE GLENCONNER CALLS Oh What a Lovely Century, “a wonderful journey through twentieth century history”. It is not a journey you will find in most accounts of the period, but the young, moustachioed, army officer on the cover of this book seems to ha

THE ORIGINAL WHAT IS HISTORY? was the published version of the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures delivered by E.H. Carr at the University of Cambridge in early 1961. It was available in a slim Penguin version in 1977 when I prepared for the General

LONDON, MOST FASCINATING of great cities, has been very badly damaged by dreadful developments in recent years, many of them money-led, but devoid of any feeling for context or even for human beings. Meanwhile the wreckage of whole areas through ideo

IN THE EARLY 1960S, on Sundays at Speakers’ Corner, there was a man who would take off his shirt and reveal that every inch of his torso was covered in tattoos. He said not a word but had a knowing smile or smirk upon his face; the assembled audience

WHILE THE REPUTATION OF some critics is held aloft by their own wind, John Carey’s rests on sterner stuff. As a reviewer for the Sunday Times and the author of books about Dickens, Donne, and others, Carey is one of the cleverest and most entertainin

STRETCHING FOR AN ESTIMATED 2,826 miles from its Mongolian source to the Pacific Ocean on Russia’s east coast — acting as the border between Russia and China for more than 1,000 miles — the Amur River is believed to be the tenth longest on the planet

‘‘ZADIE SMITH Syndrome” was a term coined back in the 2000s — possibly by Private Eye but it may have been The Spectator — to describe a novel by an author whose celebrity is such that whatever flaws their book may possess are instantly reimagined as

IN AN INDUSTRY THAT’S STILL, mostly, too self-consciously classy to give star ratings on its reviews, we nonetheless long to share — just as you demand to know — the best of the best. Is it that book I raved about and you bought but never got around

WATCHING BERNARD HAITINK from the choir seats behind the orchestra at London’s Royal Festival Hall, I received free masterclasses over several years in the art and practice of conducting. Haitink would come on stage, bald pate sheened with sweat, and

I’M SLIGHTLY DREADING SPOTIFY doing its annual round-up of what I’ve been listening to this year. I’ve had quite an odd one for music: because I’ve been writing a book about the noughties, my choices have been — well, “niche” covers some of it, and a

ATTENTIVE READERS WILL HAVE noticed that this column has spookily become the nerve-centre of the British opera world: like Richard Burton in The Medusa Touch, I merely have to dream up some new batshit hell and it instantly comes to pass. Of course i

LATE 2021 HAS SEEN a flurry of activity as a number of objects with contested provenances were returned to their countries of origin. In October, Jesus College, Cambridge became the first institution in the world to send back a Benin bronze, looted i

ONE OF THE MANY JOYS of our new streaming universe, where years’ worth of content can be instantly accessed, is digging around in the more obscure corners of Netflix and Amazon Prime. For those with the patience to read subtitles, there is a cornucop

ANYONE WATCHING Leave No Traces, the political thriller that is Poland’s official entry for Best International Feature Film at the coming Oscars, is likely to feel some sympathy for the Law and Justice Party’s efforts since 2015 to purge Communist-er

IT IS EASY TO PATRONISE CLASSIC FM. People have been looking the other way for 30 years, and congratulating themselves on their refinement. “Easy listening,” they scoff, which is partly true. You don’t tune in expecting to hear a blast of Busoni. Onl

THE ARRIVAL OF THE Christmas season is a reminder that while the West End is the beating heart of British theatre, it is in what used to be called the “provinces” — now more delicately in arts-speak the “regions” — that most of the country experience

BISHOP AUCKLAND, a small market town about ten miles south-west of Durham, in the heart of what was until recently mining country, is the site of a fascinating experiment in urban regeneration, financed not by the state but a private individual. The

Tulips “Nice, red, tall stiff, In a vase, On a table, In a room, In our house.” FANS OF SUE TOWNSEND’S Adrian Mole will recognise this poem, the work of Mole’s yobbish nemesis Barry Kent. Barry naturally wins the poetry prize for which Mole is earnes

HURRAH FOR FOOD SHORTAGES! In my land of abundance on the superior side of the Atlantic I read about beleaguered Britain: empty shelves, bare cupboards and idle HGVs. I start imagining a morally enhanced future, where readers of The Critic tighten be

Do you prefer green or yellow? The question is not a trite one. I am not pursuing your preference for ties or socks. Nor am I keen to know which jelly-baby you, as a toddler, always saved for last. Rather, I am curious about your choice, as a tippler

AS I LOOK AROUND my sitting room and consider my motley collection of cherished treasures, it is peculiar to consider these as fashion items. But interior design and styles of furniture are forever being examined according to what is and is not consi

ONE CANNOT BE WELLDRESSED sans scent. You can try, but you will fail, and your life will be the smaller and the sorrier for it. The ancients knew this. From the moment we first have signs of civilisation we find the presence of perfume: in Mesopotami

SO COUPLES THERAPY has so far proved to be a royal waste of time. The only thing we’ve established is that Will feels that the schools our kids attend are “pressure cookers”. This, despite him having approved all three schools upon application. He to

PROFESSIONAL SPORT BRINGS AN unparalleled and immediate accountability. A player can make a mistake and lose his place in a team for weeks. A coach can lose a run of games — or simply fail to win a trophy — and find himself out of work in an instant.

DESPITE THE PANDEMIC, or perhaps partly because of it, 2021 has been a vintage sporting year. Here are ten personal highlights, in reverse order. 10. FLORA DUFFY WINS THE OLYMPIC TRIATHLON With a population of just under 64,000, Bermuda is the smalle