Last weekend I found myself trapped on an isolated, monster-infested Pacific atoll with a pair of twin psychic Japanese schoolgirls. A skyscraper-sized lizard, with three fire-breathing heads, the result of careless radioactive experiments in the 50s, and now a huge clumsy metaphor for both the dangers of human scientific meddling with Mother Nature and postwar Japanese identity…
Today, if I worked as a cartoonist for a tabloid newspaper, I could simply hand in a hurried scrawl of heaven, where Victoria Wood now plays the piano alongside Prince on guitar and John Whittingdale’s political credibility on slap bass. But instead, I must write. Does it matter that the torture-porn fan, free-market fundamentalist and…
The television food personality and chef Angela Hartnett, formerly best remembered as the Rod Hull to Gordon Ramsay’s Emu, is curating something called Kitchen Tales at the Chipping Norton Set’s cheese and music festival, Wilderness. But I can’t work out from the blurb if it is an exhibition, an event, a shop, or just some…
Junior doctors demonstrate outside the department of health on 11 February. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images It is not always easy to do the right thing. In the 80s, for example, I remember when we all tried to avoid buying apartheid-era South African fruit. “Are these apples from South Africa?”, a photographer friend asked a cockney…
My usual methods of decoding experience – art, literature and old punk rock records – have been rendered irrelevant by the sheer unscrupulousness of our public figures. We are in a post-Thick of It world, where the fictional PR attack dog Malcolm Tucker seems, compared with those schooled by Lynton Crosby OBE, dancing in Dionysiac…