Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in which Hanks stars as Fred McFeely Rogers, host of the long-running American children’s show Mister Rogers’... read more

‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for custom with James’s Waldorf-Astoria, and the ‘hotel spirit’ – James’s name for the combination of superficial bustle and intense loneliness... read more

Sitting in a white leather armchair at a hustings event in June last year, Boris Johnson bragged that he had, more than any other politician, ‘stuck up for the bankers’ in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Earlier, while mayor of London, he described himself as ‘the champion... read more

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more became a force in British politics. Anti-Semitism was at the heart of the fascist revival in postwar Britain. Loathing for... read more

The term ‘Company painting’ has been widely used to describe works commissioned from Indian artists by members of the East India Company from the 1770s until 1857. There are all kinds of problems with this label, most notably that it gives priority to the patrons rather than the artists. Not only is this self-evidently... read more

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of rabbits – a number of them, over a period of several weeks. None of the rabbits, not even a ‘perfect’... read more