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What Trump is getting right

Freddy Gray and Scott McConnell discuss the American tragedy with Isabel Hardman: Almost anyone who has followed the US presidential selection process closely could realise what a brilliant campaign Donald Trump has conducted. He saw that in its self-absorption, the US political class had completely failed to grasp the extent of public anger at the

American horror story

Freddy Gray and Scott McConnell discuss the American tragedy with Isabel Hardman:  Cleveland, Ohio ‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. If you can’t decipher what that means, don’t worry, that’s the point. ‘It’s always good to do things nice and complicated,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘so that

Turkey’s continental drift

In Turkish the word ‘yurt’ has two definitions. It means ‘place’, ‘land’, ‘territory’, ‘homeland’. It could also indicate a round, portable tent, the likes of which have been used by nomadic tribes for centuries. In my imagination I have always liked to combine the two definitions, wondering if motherlands could be just as peripatetic as

The bust that wasn’t

It has been a month since the UK voted to leave the European Union — but something is missing. Where is the economic collapse? What of EUpocalypse Now? Where is the Brexageddon that we were promised? To the shock of many — not least business titans who bankrolled the Remain campaign — the instant collapse

Never gonna give EU up

June the 24th was a grim morning for Remain voters, and we’ve been working through the seven stages of grief ever since. Given that nobody has the faintest idea when, how or even if the UK will actually leave, acceptance is still some way off. But Remainers are a pragmatic bunch and many have now

Beat echoes

Laid out flat, running the length of the exhibition, the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road forms the spine of the large Beat Generation show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Even for those familiar with the published version of the manuscript seeing this holy relic — the founding document for all sects

What wasps do for us

Dom Perignon, Pimms, Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola — one’s as good as the other, so far as they’re concerned. Even if they don’t manage to drown in the stuff, they spoil the taste for drinkers by creating panic out of all proportion to their size. They destroy the ardour of al-fresco lovers in an instant.

Notes on...

The gardens of Ninfa

I’ve just been given a personal tour of Ninfa by Monty Don. True, I had to share the thinking woman’s TV gardener with a number of others, but I’m convinced his attention was focused solely on me. The occasion was a visit to three outstanding gardens outside Rome — Ninfa, Villa d’Este and Landriana —