Spectator Life

It’s a painful process many of us must go through: culling a big book collection, amassed over a lifetime, before moving home. You know it makes sense, as you’ve struggled to house all your books – thousands of them – and they include quite a few you frankly wouldn’t miss. This chore awaits me at

Of all the places to witness the circus parade of modern French history, you can do a lot worse than the tiny town of Espalion, in the beautiful department of L’Aveyron, in the south of France. Because there are few destinations more unchanged than L’Aveyron, and this extremely French place is where I saw the

I was in S&M relationships from my teenage years to somewhere in my naughty forties. Why did I go in for such strange antics? Damned if I know. Is it because I wanted to be different? Because I didn’t want a calm, cosy, devoted relationship, like my parents had? Because when I thought of romantic

Few bluesmen have matched the success of John Mayall, ‘the godfather of British blues’, who died on Monday aged 90 at his home in California. In a career spanning more than six decades, he made 50-odd albums with an ever-changing incarnation of his band, the Bluesbreakers. His proselytisation of black American artists like Muddy Waters,

If ever a mental health diagnosis can be called ‘fashionable’, it’s ADHD, or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. The mere mention of it can trigger moans that it’s nothing but the latest ‘woke’ way to pathologise fidgeting, lack of self-discipline and bad parenting. So if you’re in that camp who rolls their eyes everytime you hear the term,

No matter how much you love music, going to a piano recital can be an uncomfortable experience. A sombre-faced pianist plays in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, perhaps swaying and grimacing to simulate profundity. If a sonata is performed, outbreaks of guilty coughing will occur throughout the audience between movements. It’s an unwritten rule that

I suppose you could say that I’m an ‘amateur’ artist, that art is my ‘hobby’. In fact no, I take that back. I’m no amateur hobbyist dabbler. I’m an artist. I’m a bloody artist. If you take something seriously, the hobby label grates. And I take art seriously. I might not be on track to

The pop star Sam Smith appears not only to have a magic mirror which affirms that he’s stunning and brave, but also that he’s a lovely little thinker. During lockdown, self-isolating in his £12 million home, he filmed himself weeping because he was already bored with his own company. ‘I hate reading,’ he cried, suggesting

The Japanese singer, actor and heartthrob Matsumoto Jun, who I’ve always thought of as an Oriental David Cassidy (thus showing my age), will make his UK acting debut later this year when he appears in acclaimed playwright Hideki Noda’s very loose adaptation of the Brothers Karamazof at Sadler’s Wells. Jun is, not to sell him

I fell in love with London when I arrived here as a teenager at the start of the 1970s. Straight out of an American suburban high school, I’d dreamed of the great metropolis of Shakespeare and Dickens, and I vowed never to leave. Why would I, when, as Dr Samuel Johnson famously declared, ‘He who

Anne Hathaway’s latest film, The Idea of You, has become Amazon’s most-streamed rom com, causing me to reflect that Hollywood’s young man/older woman scenario has changed for the better since The Graduate. Though everyone was mad for it at the time, was there ever a grimmer film about relationships? We’re meant to empathise with the

Last Monday, a group of 20 French rappers released a video entitled ‘No Pasarán’. Evoking the Republican resistance against Franco in the Spanish civil war and before that, the resistance of the French against the Germans during the Great War, the phrase called for people to resist Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. If last night’s

After a while you forget: was I up for Portillo, or had I gone to bed? I think I’d gone to bed. Abbott, Boateng and Bernie Grant, in bed, I definitely remember that. And Powell, accordingly, out. Was that – what? – ’87? What even was that? 1997: where the hell was I? 2010? That

Anyone visiting the small Westphalian city of Münster in north-west Germany may notice three man-sized cages hanging from the handsome St Lambert’s Roman Catholic Church in the city’s main square, the Prinzipalmarkt, and wonder about their provenance. The cages are one of the last visible relics of an episode in which society took leave of

Steve Cotten is standing to be an MP in this week’s general election. He has also been called ‘Britain’s grumpiest pub landlord’ by the Daily Mail, the Mirror and the New York Post. In truth, Steve, 64, isn’t grumpy. Not often, anyway. He’s eccentric, certainly, but kind, generous and good humoured, and dedicated to his

I live north of the river in London and my parents live south of it, in the Tunbridge Wells. I have long been a registered user of the Dartford Crossing for fear of forgetting to pay to cross – and thus incurring an automatic fine. This means that the cameras at the bridge and tunnel

Over five decades, I have been lucky enough to witness some of the great rock concerts of our time. Bob Dylan at Blackbushe in the late 1970s, The Everly Brothers Reunion Concert at the Albert Hall in the early 1980s, The Rolling Stones at New York’s Shea Stadium in the 1990s and Bruce Springsteen and

Prius owners are always demanding more legislation against drink driving, but an advantage of living in America is that if you are too trashed to drive home, your 15-year-old kid can pick you up from the bar. The only problem with this is that we Americans love reckless driving too much to let anyone else