I had expected to write about David Cameron’s dramatic U-turn on the refugee crisis, reflecting on how a single photograph of a dead child and the emotional response had propelled a Prime Minister into a sweeping change of policy. Instead, what is more striking after his statement to the Commons yesterday afternoon is the degree to which Cameron has stood his ground.
Radio 4 is full of unexpected gems, and one of the brightest for me this summer has been the writer and broadcaster Francine Stock’s history of charisma, that magnetic personal quality which we all would like to have.
My name, why? I’m asked a lot, and the simplest thing to do is take you back to 1989, when two conventionally-named adults, facing the legal deadline for registering their child’s name, were deep in the wilderness of the unknown. They did not share a surname (thanks to a gnarled family tree, we actually all three have different surnames) so wanted my first name to stand on its own. “Casmin” was seriously considered and, mercifully, thought better of. The Great Book of Baby Names had been dolefully cast aside. Читать дальше...
Nicole Kidman has said that her return to the West End is a tribute to her biochemist father and other research scientists whose contributions to vital discoveries are often overlooked by history.
Whether you're smashing a PB or just pounding the pavements, top-quality sound makes all the difference
Whenever we hear about hypersexuality, it is usually in the context of celebrities who have gotten themselves into trouble and are seeking therapy to remedy their ways. However, most people would be surprised to learn that the root cause of hypersexuality, or so-called “sex addiction,” is hardly ever related to sex.
Too little, too late, Prime Minister
Christopher Eccleston has attacked social prejudice in theatre acting and suggested that only white, middle-class men get cast in classical roles in London.
“Hey, those people fleeing war in Syria aren’t poor at all! Look, they all have smartphones!” is one increasingly tedious complaint that has been bubbling away on social media recently. Owning a mobile phone, it seems, should render one ineligible for help when trying to stop themselves and their families from dying in a war.
Last month, a UN agency released figures which beggared belief. They revealed that the infant mortality rate in Gaza, which had been declining steadily since 1960, was on the rise for the first time in 50 years. It is a reversal which UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, which released the data, describes as “unprecedented”.
“I have to say it came at a very inconvenient time”: that's Willem speaking, a 34 year old banker working in New York. He's irritated because a business meeting has been interrupted by a phone call from his mother. She tells him that his much younger brother, Pauli, has died of a heart attack and she summons him back to his estranged family in Amsterdam for the funeral. This news forces Willem into a painfully reluctant reckoning with his own alienated aridity and avoidance of involvement. Significantly... Читать дальше...
Fans of The Goonies may have been on a rollercoaster ride of emotions as far as a sequel is concerned, but the good news is that an immersive theatre play based on the 1985 family film is in the pipeline and this time, it sounds like it's actually going to happen.
In the cobbled sprawl of Camden market, beyond the DayGlo circus store, past the goth shops and their velvet corsets, near enough to the street-food stalls to smell paella, Greek sausages and Japanese tempura, there’s a tiny shop. Outside, there is usually a display case or two of odd silvery treasures, and inside there are shelves of earrings, cufflinks, bracelets and rings. While there are enough treasures to captivate the more discerning magpie, there’s none of the overwhelming metallic jumble... Читать дальше...
When I wrote about the “refugee crisis we dare not even name” last week, contrasting our Government’s lack of sympathy with the Dutch who risked death to shelter Anne Frank during the Second World War, there had been no photo of Aylan al-Kurdi washed up on the Turkish beach, no mass exodus from Budapest railway station. We were still in denial: “swarm” territory.
This weekend sees the end of the Proms season and the celebrated Last Night of the Proms. The evening is best known for the rousing sing-along of "Land of Hope and Glory", flag-waving and general jollity. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that. But it should be best known for something else altogether.
One section of Opinium’s People and Power survey that I reported in The Independent on Sunday a week ago was about the contracting out of public services, often described as privatisation.
One of the paradoxes of the modern, secular age is the lingering strength of the sacred. Although most people long ago ceased to have any connection to organised religion, the instinct to defer to faith leaders on certain life and death issues remains a powerful one. Church leaders and other clerics make good use of this unconscious genuflection, which is why they will be expecting politicians to pay close attention to their joint letter to Parliament, urging MPs to vote against the Assisted Dying Bill. Читать дальше...
It is not often that the Chancellor’s plans to slash a government department’s spending get a hearty cheer from a liberal or left-of-centre corner. But George Osborne has found an unexpected, not to say unlikely, ally in the shape of the Howard League for Penal Reform, which says that cutting the prison population by about half would shave at least a quarter off the justice ministry’s budget, neatly meeting Mr Osborne’s financial target for non-ringfenced departments.
If you talk to economists in the financial markets, the only way UK interest rates will go in the near future is up. Many have been saying the first increase will come in a matter of months – and some have been saying the same thing for over a year.
The remains of a prehistoric temple a couple of miles from Stonehenge is yielding evidence of a religious revolution.