Culture wars are as old as politics itself – and far from being inauthentic confections, they cut to the heart of real, living disagreements about history, identity, nationhood and belonging.
Let’s do away with moralising about music and take pure pleasure in the work of composers of the past.
Our enduring fascination with celebrity body parts reminds us of the frailty of being human.
As Britons fulfil their Census obligations this week, they’ll do well to take a note from Sir Ernest Benn’s libertarian resistance to bureaucracy.
The brief re-opening of the Rodin Museum’s gardens gave Parisians a bewitching respite from their everyday cares.
Set amidst the ruins of the ancien régime in his native Normandy, Barbey’s masterpiece is bewitched by the spectre of dead priests and a community torn by struggle.
Women played a vital role in the early history of botany – let’s not reduce their contribution to kitsch romance.
As Proust noted, our incremental memories of the world are the foundation of our lives – but where have they gone?
It is a commonplace saying that we must listen more. But in our noisy world it takes a lot of skill and energy.
Online exhibitions have nothing on the living art of Venice. Seeing its Renaissance beauty again is pure joy.
Across our cities and towns, night’s natural darkness is giving way to the glare and dazzle of LED lighting – but to embrace it wholeheartedly is to risk losing more than ominous shadows.
Audacious dynamism and uninhibited creativity defined the music scene in the party-hard 90s – the last decade when outsiders could become bona fide rock n’ roll stars.
The beautiful game seemed made for the Italy of wild hair, baggy shorts and Euro-optimism. But did the glory days of Series A ever really exist?
The breakdown of Yugoslavia in the 1990s shattered optimism in liberal democracy and transnational cooperation. History did not end – it continued.
Pop became Sweden’s biggest cultural export in the 1990s when the hit machine went into overdrive. The roots of it lie in the 1970s and the Swedish love of manufacturing.
It was the decade of Friends, Bill Clinton and a fresh new pan-European passport. Underneath the teen-pop smile of the nineties there were blemishes.
In the digital age, intellectual debate is more polarising and vituperative than ever. To generate the new thinking needed to navigate our uncertain global landscape we should revisit the kind of serious ideas on geopolitics that scholars advanced in the 1990s.
Once admired by contemporaries like Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton’s gritty tales of down-and-out London are finally receiving the praise they deserve.
Our cities are so saturated in the mythology of the ancient world that classical allusions pop up in unexpected places.
A 17th century reflection on the virtues of travel shows us what is being lost during the pandemic.
The poet Edith Sitwell has more to offer than her infamous reputation suggests.
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