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A new faction has emerged and it could decide Labour’s future: the “soft right”
These are politicians who are far more moderate than Corbyn but who believe, in the words of one: “We’re going to have to try to make this work.”“Get some fat men around him!” That was the message...
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Life after death: Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family
Bill Clegg’s first novel – longlisted for the Man Booker Prize – is a reminder that anything could happen to any of us, at any time. Bill Clegg’s first novel, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is a...
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Why fire remains a burning issue
“The only fire department on a university is the one that sends emergency vehicles when an alarm sounds.” We need to know more about fire. Stephen Pyne, a professor at Arizona State University, points...
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The Returning Officer: Tories III
“. . . genuine golden Tories, one; water-on-land Tories, one; hugging Tories, one. . . " In 1842, the Stamford Mercury reported on a meeting of Louth Town Council. The first business of the day was to...
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With a new laptop and a recovering parent, things are looking up. So why did...
One imagines that the abilities of 47,000-plus employees sitting around on beanbags and drinking really good coffee could have been put to better use. There is light at the end of the tunnel: a new...
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Salman Rushdie's latest is a “rummage around scepticism and superstition”
Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and A Strangeness in My Mind by Orhan Pamuk. The novel of ideas has been dealt a series of knocks since the days of high modernism, when...
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I don’t know where I’d be without my favourite celebrity: Stacey Solomon
She is witty, self-deprecating and obviously smart in an offbeat way, so as to neutralise those inclined to dismiss young, working-class women out of hand. When the first ever British series of Big...
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How fermentation became the new word for food pseuds
Let it rot, and keep your little microbes happy. An unfortunate side effect of Britain’s much-lauded culinary revolution is that it is becoming ever harder for us food pseuds to get much in the way of...
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The Ascent of Woman isn’t perfect – but it does let female expertise shine
The Ascent of Woman seems like it was born to be broadcast on the BBC, unlike All Change at Longleat, which feels like one it has nicked from ITV. Amanda Foreman’s documentary series The Ascent of...
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The use of 3-D in Everest feels about as vital as a grand piano up a mountain
The Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur's film is like an inexperienced climber: caught between the ground and success. Fictional disaster movies have the best of both worlds, piling on the...
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Purely platonic: why a Greek philosopher may have liked this week's Woman's Hour
Kim Cattrall's plain-speaking Woman's Hour edit left the drama aside to look at everyday experience as unfolding layers of reality. The annual week of guest-edited Woman’s Hours began (14 September,...
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Riddle me this – if you’re squatting in a homeless persons unit, are you...
I was to be evicted for being illegally in accommodation for homeless people. They, Camden Council, would then have to rehouse me, as I had a small child. For some reason I was “against” squatting...
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The Great British Bake Off: the five most horrifying moments of Victorian week
Step AWAY from the gelatine.The Great British Bake Off is always an enriching and delightful sensory experience, but last night it was for all the wrong reasons. I mean I guess once they were baked...
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Quiet at the back! Rob Brydon is formidable, but can't quite save Future...
Matthew Warchus’s first production at the Old Vic feels like a declaration of intent – but does it stand up? Almost exactly 11 years ago, Kevin Spacey launched his artistic directorship of the Old Vic...
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Carol Morley’s The Falling: an aesthetic exploration of the heartbreak of...
“It feels like you're blacking out. Dying.”“We're not kids anymore, Lamb.” So Abbie (Florence Pugh), says to Lydia (Maisie Williams) in Carol Morley's The Falling, a dizzying, disorienting film about...
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Facebook isn’t building a “dislike” button
Contrary to yesterday's reports, CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks a “dislike” button would not be “good for the world”. So what is Facebook building instead? Stand down, cynics and haters. As it turns out,...
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Jeremy Corbyn bolsters his team with former Livingstone and Johnson aide...
The well-regarded City Hall veteran will be the Labour leader's director of policy and rebuttal. After his fifth day in the job, Jeremy Corbyn's team is beginning to take shape. Having appointed a...
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Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of drowned children shows the very prejudice it...
The image of a drowned child is not a successful way of satirising western capitalist decadence. Another day, another Charlie Hebdo controversy. The latest brouhaha to embroil the French satirical...
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Videogame fans will have more fun if they don't take games criticism too...
Games are considered to exist in competition with each other in a way that no other creative works are, and their fans mind more about critics. Perhaps it is the existential futility of it all,...
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Why can’t we be clear about transparency in the Family Court?
Family judges disagree about approach to reporting of cases involving financial disputes after divorce. It is the job of a judge to form and express views on the most difficult and delicate of topics,...
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