Modern times
Every village used to have a church and a pub. Now it has an all-night BP garage and a massage parlour
Tag: Culture
Previous convictions
I am one of the silent ones, part of an unnoticed backlash against vegetarianism
The whole picture
What are the Turner prize celebrities, such as Damien Hirst, up to? Are they legitimately challenging our ideas of what art is? Or, by calling their works "art," do they encourage us to see a continuity between themselves and the…
Opera’s funeral march
Geoffrey Wheatcroft experiences a highly charged farewell
Sarlat
Suddenly the French are not so morose. They have the best football team in the world and they can think philosophically
The old tunes are the best…
Modern musicals try to dominate audiences, unlike their far superior American forebears
…and the old films too
Charles Drazin puts Britain's current film renaissance into historical perspective
Moore figures
On the 100th anniversary of Henry Moore's birth, Anthony Barnett asks what the sculptor's reclining figures meant
Modern manners
Jeremy Clarke discovers how to get on the wrong side of a tribe of pygmies
Modern manners
Jeremy Clarke and his sister Viv discover a working heritage dome and a long lost world
Modern manners
Jeremy Clarke recalls a Christmas Day in Mali and his unfair bargaining position with a pimp
What’s wrong with ballet?
Ballet used to be popular with both elite and mass audiences. The Royal Ballet was a centre of world ballet and its profits subsidised the Royal Opera. Now nobody cares
Fictional failure
British fiction is thriving, according to publishers. But having read countless novels as a Booker judge, Jason Cowley is disenchanted by the shallowness of Britain's literary vision. Is it a passing bad patch or a sign of long-term cultural decline?
Looking back at Godot
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and not John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, was the greatest mid-century influence on British theatre
A literary engagement
Does literature serve any higher purpose beyond entertainment? Mario Vargas Llosa argues that, unlike television or cinema, it has a special ability and responsibility to address itself to the problems of its time
Europe trumps Hollywood
Christopher Tookey says that remakes reveal the cultural divide between Europe and the US
Venetian blind
Venice was once a city of velvet and marble-now it is tense with clingfilm, the most useless city in Italy. Duncan Fallowell has never been to Venice and thinks Oslo might be more inspiring
High brow, low retention
The cultural establishment claims that demanding television programmes draw smaller but more committed audiences. New research suggests that this is wishful thinking. Harold Lind sees no escape from cultural elitism