Art and Culture

Latronico is a slim, pale young man with glasses and an earring. He stands ext to his book, with a blue cover.

Picture Perfect

Vincenzo Latronico’s prismatic novel ‘Perfection’ is a lament for the hopes and dreams of a generation reconfigured by the internet.

Andrew White 8 Apr 2025 · 9 min read

A sheet of music burns with orange flames.

The Emperor’s New Score

Classical music was one of the first fields to impose the self-censorship that now pervades so many areas of intellectual and cultural life.

Nicholas McRoberts 25 Mar 2025 · 5 min read

Elsie Inglis in grainy, black and white portrait from early 1900s. Sepia background image of suffragettes with placards.

Rumble on the Royal Mile

Scottish feminists are angry that an accomplished male sculptor has been commissioned to make a statue of a suffragette.

Aidan Harte 25 Mar 2025 · 5 min read

Melanie Safka as a young woman, smiling. She has long, wavy brown hair and brown eyes.

Something I Need

A tribute to groundbreaking pop star Melanie Safka (1947–2024).

Dave Thompson 19 Mar 2025 · 15 min read

Scene from the film, with the Count in front of Notre Dame. In the foreground, dying men.

The Many Faces of ‘The Count of Monte Cristo’

Alexandre Dumas’s novel is by turns an adventure story, a paean to bourgeois values, and a Greek epic. No wonder it continues to fascinate.

Stewart Slater 14 Mar 2025 · 9 min read

Composite image of Tsar Nicholas II, Marco Polo and King Aššurbanipal.

Nicholas II, Aššurbanipal, and Marco Polo Walk into a Bookstore…

Quillette editor Jonathan Kay reviews three newly published history books about the Assyrian Empire, the fall of the Romanovs, and the travels of Marco Polo.

Jonathan Kay 6 Mar 2025 · 16 min read

Composite image of Andrew Hamilton and the offices of the New York Times

Hamilton and the Left

Consigned to the political wilderness, progressives and left-liberals could do a lot worse than shed their disdain for patriotism.

Brian Stewart 6 Mar 2025 · 6 min read

Karla Sofía Gascon is in her thirties. She has long, mid-brown hair and is wearing a colourful outfit.

Gender Bending Mobster Mash

With ‘Emilia Pérez,’ Jacques Audiard created—intentionally or unintentionally—a subversive assault on every plank of the current transgender credo.

Charlotte Allen 4 Mar 2025 · 16 min read

Chris Rock at a microphone. He is a young black man, smiling, wearing a shiny black shirt.

The Worst Racial Slur, In Context

Rare is the word that has antithetical meanings depending on the speaker and listener, the intent and reception. This is one such rarity.

Steve Salerno 2 Mar 2025 · 15 min read

A Violent History Obscured

South Korean Nobel laureate Han Kang’s literary experimentation thwarts rather than advances her professed concern for the suffering of everyone, everywhere, all the time.

Brad Strotten 26 Feb 2025 · 7 min read