Art & Culture

Frampton Comes Alive! at Fifty

The improbable story of rock’s greatest live album.

Jacob Bielecki 14 May 2026 · 13 min read

Black-and-white film still: a young man smokes a cigarette while a dark-haired woman beside him gazes ahead with a troubled expression. Slatted structure behind them.

Staring at the Sea

It would be very difficult to make a great film from a source as flawed as Camus’s novel, but Ozon has managed to make a very good one.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai 8 May 2026 · 19 min read

The vinyl album 'Face Value' is propped up on a shelf next to a turntable.

In the Air Tonight

How Phil Collins created the pop sound that defined the 1980s.

Jacob Bielecki 23 Apr 2026 · 12 min read

A man wearing wire-rimmed glasses examines a complex metal and wire apparatus in a dimly lit lab, his expression focused and intent.

Infinite Ingenuity: Andy Weir’s Optimistic Vision in ‘Project Hail Mary’

The new film 'Project Hail Mary' based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel, celebrates scientific problem-solving on a cosmic scale. There are striking parallels with David Deutsch's radical optimism.

Iona Italia 17 Apr 2026 · 14 min read

A young rider on horseback between two stylised sculptural trees in a surreal medieval landscape.

Rohmer at Camelot

Éric Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois (1978) vividly recreates the imaginative world in which the people of the Middle Ages lived inside their heads.

Charlotte Allen 6 Apr 2026 · 22 min read

A young woman holds a mobile phone up to her face, her eyes intent on the screen.

Doomscrolling into Adulthood

Reflections on the crisis of meaning afflicting not only Gen Z but all of us who are too online.

Iona Italia 2 Apr 2026 · 7 min read

Pale blue-skinned creature with heavily wrinkled face, white hair, and exposed teeth, lit by candlelight; fantasy/horror film prosthetic makeup.

Love and Theft

Luc Besson’s romantic adaptation of the Dracula story owes an unacknowledged debt to Eiko Ishioka, the visionary designer of Francis Cord Coppola’s 1992 classic.

Yuki Zeman 30 Mar 2026 · 11 min read

Neoclassical triumphal arch with Corinthian columns and a golden winged statue composited into a panoramic view of Washington, D.C., overlooking the Arlington Memorial Bridge.

The Edifice Complex

Monuments don’t create legacy; they merely memorialise it.

Timothy Devinney 26 Mar 2026 · 6 min read

Nick Cave performing live, holding microphone and reaching towards raised audience hands at All Points East Festival, London, 2022.

Parallel Kingdom

Nick Cave’s beautiful and tragic music brings redemptive catharsis to a grief-stricken city.

Mark Mordue 24 Mar 2026 · 10 min read

James Cameron Goes Native

‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is a Rousseau-esque oikophobic fantasy of evil humans and noble savage aliens.

William Barker 19 Mar 2026 · 7 min read

Margaret Cavendish, stylised depiction, between two classical figures.

The Original Ladies of Letters

A new book by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann examines the female poets and literary critics who challenged seventeenth-century England’s male literary establishment.

Joan Smith 17 Mar 2026 · 17 min read