The Critic Magazine

MORE HAS MEANT WORSE. Indeed, when Kingsley Amis in Encounter wrote about expanding higher education that “MORE WILL mEAN WORSE”, that was him in 1960 reviewing the fifties — a decade that now looks like a pinnacle from which everything since has fal

WHAT’S THE COLLECTIVE NOUN FOR HISTORIANS? The launch of Bettany Hughes’s captivating new book, Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, at Daunt’s in Marylebone prompted the question, with Kate Williams, Lucy Worsley, Dan Snow and Hallie Rubenhold catchi

IT HAS LONG BEEN A CLICHÉ TO SPEAK OF A CRISIS in the Humanities. As long ago as 1964, J.H. Plumb published a collection of essays under that title. Six decades later, and an article about external crises for the humanities writes itself: declining n

IT IS HARDER AND HARDER TO ESCAPE THE FEELING that the founding ideals of the university — the preservation, pursuit, and promulgation of learning; the free play of the creative intellect; the incubation of a public-spirited elite — are slowly vanish

HOW DID COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES in the United States and elsewhere in the English-speaking world become seminaries of centre-Left and radical Left ideology? That most elite campuses foster political and intellectual monocultures is not open to disp

I WORK AT A UK UNIVERSITY, TEACHING AND WRITing about the history of concepts and other out-of-the-way matters. For many years, I had shied clear of public controversy, but early in 2020, something stirred me from my academic slumber. A student came

‘‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” The calling card for a linguist ready to knock over the apple cart of mainstream behavioural psychology in 1950s academia. A sentence may be grammatically correct but nonsensical. Grammar reigns, whether at a

IN THE INSTRUCTIVE TALE OF ERIC RAVILIOUS’S posthumous reputation, three events stand out. The first occurred in September 1942, when an RAF Lockheed Hudson took off from its base in Iceland across the sparkling waters of the North Atlantic, and neve

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MEDIEVAL POTTERY DOES NOT, TODAY, HAVE THE glamour of Italy’s more famous art from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries — those fabulous frescos, mosaics, sculptures and churches that millions of people travel to Italy every year to see. But 1

AT 1.30AM ON 31 DECEMBER 2019,an eye doctor in Wuhan Central Hospital, Dr Li Wenliang, a member of the Communist Party, received a peremptory summons to attend an immediate interrogation by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission. He was made to wait u

LORD BYRON AND HIS BRIDE HAD barely left the church when their marriage began to disintegrate. The poet had wooed Anne Isabella (“Annabella”) Milbanke, a niece of Viscountess Melbourne, over a number of years, charmed by her intelligence, “high blood

Housewife favourite Dominic West’s insistence that provincial audiences prove more appreciative than West End theatregoers strikes a chord with those of us familiar with performing to these distinctly contrasting tribes. While waddling visitors to th

IN THE LONG WINTER NIGHTS, I dived into the BBC’s back channels and came up with Jakub Piatek’s extraordinary documentary on the 2021 Internatioal Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Although I had seen the contest unfold and remembered the results,

“AN ELDERLY MAN WITH MEMORY problems,” was the US Department of Justice counsel’s summary of Joe Biden’s unmoored ramblings, when the President found himself obliged to answer for careless handling of official documents. That conclusion would also wo

ONE COLD FEBRUARY MORNING in 1999 I walked down a muddy path from the village of Domachevo in Belarus into a nearby forest. In 1942, around 2,900 local Jewish people had taken the same track from the nearby ghetto to be machine-gunned into a mass gra

THE ADVENTURES OF MY SOUL among masterpieces, Anatole France called his literary criticism. Flaubert put it slightly differently. “I read,” he said, “in order to live.” Hurrah for those Frenchmen! We could always do with a bit of that spirit. A parad

OVER THE LAST SIX MONTHS OR SO, I have become mildly obsessed about the fate of a perfect example of arts-and-crafts architecture — the Church Institute in Llanfairfechan, a seaside resort off the coast road between Conway and Bangor in North Wales.

AURÉLIE CANZONERI, India Cardona, Ines Fiorini, Starkellen, Tina Lee; if any of these names are familiar then you should be doing my job. They and thousands like them are the women who can make or break restaurants through their reach on Instagram. T

THE LAST TIME I WENT TO A trade tasting of Israeli wines, I couldn’t believe the security. There were thorough bag searches, a scanner, burly guards and if your name wasn’t down, there was no way you were getting in. This was a few years ago but the

MY FASCINATION WITH FOUNTAIN PENS BEGAN A LONG TIME AGO. I remember very well the first occasion I came across one. As a little boy I was rummaging about in my grandmother’s sideboard (doubtless without permission) when I found a small cigar-shaped t

OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS, I’ve written about cooking rabbit pie, frying up squirrel goujons, and making pigeon Wellington. There have been plenty of other carnivorous episodes, so many in fact that I’ve forgotten lots of them. But what I haven’t share

ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED FOOTBALL—let alone played at a high standard or studied the game seriously — knows that the latest wheeze dreamt up by the desk wallahs of world football is a dud. From this summer, FOOTBALL WILL TRIAL BLUE CARDS. Having missed