Plain English

Here's my contribution to the Jubilee. In the summer or early autumn of 1986 I was commissioned by the NY Times - Magazine, I think I remember - to write a piece on the queen and her then prime minister, who was Margaret Thatcher. There had been some trivial business about the two of them wearing the same dress, and this led to a piece in the (British) Sunday Times saying there was some tension … [Read more...]

  Last night I saw the final, reduced-price "preview" of the new London production of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys." It opens tonight, and in my review, to be published tomorrow, I express the hope that the play will improve when the run starts for real. Almost exactly the same thing happened at the end of February, when critics were allowed in early to see a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's … [Read more...]

The front page of the London paper for April 28 (London has only one paper, the Evening Standard; the rest are national papers) had a huge headline saying that Occupy, the group that formerly targeted St Paul's, has moved on to the Olympics. (Oddly enough, the only other stories I've seen about this were a follow-up the next day in the Standard, and one story in the Independent. I don't know … [Read more...]

Sydney Smirke's (1797-1877) design for the Round Reading Room of the British Museum made it one of the architectural landmarks of the world. Readers' tickets have been held by Marx, Lenin (who used the name Jacob Richter on his library card), Bram Stoker (of "Dracula" notoriety) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - and me.Since the British Library split and moved away in 1973, the glorious space has been … [Read more...]

To be a member of the Critics' Circle in Britain you have to have been a regularly published critic of the theatre, music, dance, cinema or visual arts for at least two years. It's a handy form of accreditation and, unlike the way theatre and film people and musicians are organized, it has no aspect of trade unionism, and so is non-political and uncontroversial - for the most … [Read more...]

 "We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people." Who said that? The wisest man in Britain today, Iain Duncan Smith, once caretaker leader of the Conservative Party, Work and Pensions Secretary in the current government. He chairs the cabinet social justice committee, and what he has to say about the summer urban riots is full of good … [Read more...]

Ace Clicker   I've known the Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew since the 1980s, when he accompanied me and a troupe of (mostly) French Michelin-starred chefs on our post-publication (of The Official Foodie Handbook) tour of India. Our lot included Pierre Troisgros, Michel Rostang, Alain Dutournier, Jean-André Charial, Jean Lameloise and journalists Gilles Pudlowski, Fay Maschler, Gael … [Read more...]

This question became urgent this week when my autumn roundup of performing arts events went to press on Thursday evening for Friday's paper. The "fact-checker" (I put it in scare quotes as the title is itself redundant: if something really is a fact, it obviously doesn't need checking) altered many of the dates in my piece. Why did she do this? Because she had checked the theatre websites online, … [Read more...]

Alan  Hollinghurst is on the 2011 Man Booker Prize longlist for The Stranger's Child, having - deservedly - won some years ago for The Line of Beauty. The Stranger's Child involves a Rupert Brooke-like poet, essentially gay, who might have fathered a child in this complex plot, which takes in several generations. I'm now trying to read the entire longlist, in … [Read more...]

Only moments ago, watching the ITV News account of the tsunami resulting from the earthquake in NE Japan, I heard the announcer say that low-lying Pacific Islands were menaced - and that for many of them this was a double blow, as some of them had previously had to be evacuated owing to the consequences of global warming. It strikes me as odd - and interesting - that the TV news presenter can … [Read more...]