The Critic Magazine

Editor: Christopher Montgomery Deputy Editor: Graham Stewart Art Director: Martin Colyer Designers: David Rice and Sofia Azcona Production Editor: Nick Pryer Deputy Production Editor: Neil Armstrong Literary Editor: David Butterfield Executive Editor

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ONE OF THE SIGNS YOU’RE GETTING OLDER is that you learn of the death of an actor or singer you’d heard nothing about for ages, and your immediate reaction is surprise that they were not already dead. Thus it was in late October when the Women’s Equal

From: Badenoch, Kemi Saw yr report about my speech. You’ve completely misrepresented my position. Of course I’m not saying children should be made to wear flammable pyjamas. That would be ridiculous. I’m just saying that it’s not the government’s job

GIOACHINO ANTONIO ROSSINI WAS SAID TO HAVEwept thrice in his adult life; once when his first opera was booed, a second time when he heard Niccolò Paganini play and last when he watched, appalled, as a truffle-stuffed turkey fell out of a picnic baske

THE CRITICS ARE GUSHING about the pneumatic naked tennis. Mrs Ned is agog at Aidan Turner’s fecund facial furniture. Me? I’m salivating over the business deals: the new screen adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s 1980s novel Rivals brings to life an importan

HOW WILL THE UNITED STATES FOREIGN policy establishment and their supporting commentariat respond to the shocking political resurrection of Donald Trump? Will they grapple with painful realities and examine the deficiencies of foreign and economic po

IF YOU COULD BE TRANSPORTED BACK 50 YEARS, to the London of 1974, where would you choose to be a fly on the wall? Surely at 52 Campden Hill Square in Holland Park, the home of Sir Hugh Fraser — the charismatic war hero, Scottish aristocrat and Tory M

THE NIGHTMARE HAS HAPPENED. The racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic voters of the United States have elected Donald Trump. I feel like moving to America just so that I can emigrate in protest. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that on

THIS OCTOBER A MAJOR SCHOLARLY ACHIEVEMENT WAS realised with the publication of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy on the naval history of Britain from 660 AD to 1945. It has been an odyssey, albeit

IN JUNE 2021, A 48-YEAR-OLD MAN HANGED HIM self in London. He called himself an “anti-capitalist queer” and he was a playwright and theatre director celebrated as a genius by his queer, anti-capitalist comrades and the theatres who liked a bit of que

The following statement is to be found in an article in Scientific American about mankind’s prehistory and the assumption that men were hunters while women were gatherers: Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biologic

HOW FAR IS RUSSIA, BLOODSTAINED and defiant, a reactive securityseeker, pushing back against Western encroachment? Or how far is it darker than that: an imperial aggrandizer, greedily expanding less for security than for glory, prestige and the sheer

THE 1650S ARE BACK. AGAINST THE backdrop of our new Carolean age, a flurry of books has appeared to illuminate our nation’s brief flirtation with republican government. Paul Lay, quondam literary editor of The Critic, led the way with Providence Lost

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO WE HAVE Never Been Woke, having used some of the data Musa al-Gharbi had gathered for it in my last book. An empirical sociologist providing measurements of the rise and — hopefully — the beginning of the fall of “woken

IN SEPTEMBER, TWO CITIES IN GERMANY took part in a peculiar bet. Greifswald, a once-bustling trade centre on the Baltic coast, laid down the gauntlet to Dresden: which of their respective marketplaces could gather the most people together dressed in

ART WRITING IS AN INCREASINGLY niche interest, this magazine’s success notwithstanding. Critique is so marginal that contemporary artists and curators hardly bother reading reviews, let alone indulge critics and their arcane ideas of taste. After Bri

IN THE OPENING SENTENCE OF “THE CRUEL REdeemer Lazarus Morell”, Jorge Luis Borges, ever the master of the breviloquent narrative, summarised the plight of the Americas: In 1517, Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, feeling great pity for the Indians who grew

THE IRONICAL QUESTION MARK OF THE title of Justin Jacobs’s Plunder? is a courageous gesture of defiance against the all-pervading backdrop of postcolonial discourse; his book succinctly demolishes the anachronistic concept that museum artefacts are a

IN THE UK, AMONG MANY OTHER PLACES, WEare having fewer children and having them later in life, if at all. What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, co-authored by philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, does not seek to answer its own

We meet professor higgins in Pygmalion (1912) eavesdropping on the impending subject of his sociolinguistic experiment, taking notes on the wretched flower girl’s stretched, strangulated speech. He boasts of placing a man’s accent to within two miles

HISTORY REBELS AGAINST DIGESTS. It baulks at sweeping generalisations, pouts at dogmas and grudgingly tolerates nuances. That is why the concept of the canon came in handy. Short of time to consider human creation and activity in full, students and t

THE CLOSEST I HAVE EVER COME TO meeting a Cromwellian solider was not at some Civil War reenactment by the Sealed Knot, but at a Church of England’s “Vision and Strategy Day”. To be sure, the person in question was sporting some nondescript Boden cou

THE JOURNEY TOWARDS RELIGION, FAITH and spirituality is a personal one. Some people immediately identify with their family’s traditions and customs, while others gradually drift into it. Some choose not to follow this path and firmly reject it. There

IN A YEAR THAT HAS SEEN MORE HISTORY in the making than most, several outstanding books have come from our historians. Sir Noel Malcolm’s Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 (OUP, £25) upends almost everythi

IT’S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN WHEN THIS column helpfully sorts sheep from goats, wheat from chaff and men from boys in our reckoning of the best fiction published in 2024. As ever, we omit from this list the best new titles we have covered already in

● I REMEMBER WELL THE DAY THE symphony died. It was August 1975 and I was sitting in a television newsroom when the teleprinter clattered out a Moscow dateline. “Hold the bulletin,” I cried. “Shostakovich is dead.” I was met by a wall of blank faces.

● THEY’VE DUG UP POOR OLD ALMA again. You’d have thought the Head Muse (and succubus) of old Vienna had enough on her plate without also being the amazing composer we are now told she is — despite the technicality of not writing anything you might wa

● THE ONLY THING THAT COULD have made this a bigger year for Charli XCX would have been a different result in the presidential election. Back when Kamala Harris was first announced as the Democratic candidate, Charli — real name Charlotte Gemma Aitc

● EACH YEAR, ART BASEL ART FAIR and the bank and financial services provider UBS produce a survey of global collecting. The focus is on high net worthindividuals but their data crunching also yields an overview of wider art-buying trends and shifts.

● IF IT’S A SIGN OF A DURABLE SATIRE that a lot of us can do an impersonation of a deluded nuclear scientist driving the world towards atomic annihilation in Dr Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 parody of Mutually Assured Destruction unleashing acc

● THE SCREENWRITER BLAKE SNYDER, who died in 2009, was one of those creatives who taught more successfully than he did. He’s credited with writing just two films, of which the most successful is 1992’s cop comedy Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot. This is f

● IT’S A BRAVE WRITER THAT REimagines The Day of the Jackal. Written by Frederick Forsyth and first published in 1971, the global bestseller remains in print in multiple languages. Its enduring success is especially impressive as the storyline revolv

● ASHES UNDER URICON. THAT’S ONE way of describing the presidency of Joe Biden, asleep at the wheel, before the Democrat powerbrokers handed Kamala Harris the most treacherous of hospital passes. Whack! “Sleepy Joe”, the Irish-American who would stru

● FROM HORROR FILMS TO HAUNTED houses, a lot of us have a perverse attraction to fear. Few want to be in actual death-defying circumstances — though some do, like BASE jumpers or cave divers — but we like to experience fear in an environment where it

● ONE OF THE MORE SURPRISING projects to be shortlisted for this year’s Stirling Prize was the so-called King’s Cross Masterplan, the development of the railway yards and urban wasteland north of King’s Cross: unexpected, not because it was undeservi

CLASS INFILTRATION IS THE new sex. Jilly Cooper’s 1988 novel Rivals is on the telly, provoking a spate of rapturous Eighties nostalgia from middle-aged lady commentators. Gins and tonic in the morning! Massive earrings! Rupert Campbell-Black (I hold

EX AFRICA SEMPER ALIQUID NOVI, except in food. From south of the Sahara, the continent has contributed astonishingly little — relative to its size — to other people’s cuisines. Yams have become naturalised in parts of the U.S., but “soul” food genera

THE SOARING PRICE OF Burgundy is a perennial topic for wine writers. Back in 1986, Auberon Waugh was complaining about how his beloved Chambolle-Musigny Les Amoureuses is “villainously overpriced — largely, I suspect, because it is much sought after

RONALD LAUDER PROCLAIMED that as a young collector, the two words which excited him the most when visiting an art exhibition were “private collection”. Private collections, unlike most public or state collections, present the tantalising prospect tha

LAST SUNDAY I LOOKED across the lane from a small cottage I’m renovating and saw something both horrifying and very sweet. Two little children were standing outside a wooden stable, looking in at five kittens that weren’t much more than a couple of w

● ONE OF THE MOST UNDERRATED AMERICAN authors of the twentieth century is Rex Stout, creator of Nero Wolfe and a canon of some three dozen mystery stories featuring the super-sized sleuth. Set in mid-century, mid-town New York, Wolfe lives in servant

● IF YOU WANT AN EARLY CHRISTMAS TREAT, GOOGLE “Wayward Lad King George”. His three wins in 1982, 1983 and 1985 are each, in their own way, about as good as it gets. The nostalgia dopamine hit is off the charts when you realise some of the horses he

NO ONE NEEDS NEW CLOTHES for 2024’s festive onslaught because of the three Ps. For which read: the planet (obv); poverty — does anyone actually have any money any more? I know I don’t; and the patriarchy, because it’s always the patriarchy, amirite?

MALCOLM MARSHALL, arguably the greatest fast bowler in history, died 25 years ago this month. He was just 41, and colon cancer had eaten him from the inside out: he weighed only four stone when he died. His funeral in Barbados was broadcast across th

FORTUNES CAN CHANGE QUICKLY in the English Football League. At the beginning of the 24-25 season, QPR looked like one of the better teams in the Championship. Our new manager, a young Spaniard called Martí Cifuentes, had saved us from what looked lik