Death in Venice review – Britten’s final opera soars in WNO’s captivating staging
Olivia Fuchs’ new production casts aerialists as the Polish family to stunning effect. Mark Le Brocq is a sympathetic Aschenbach and Leo Hussain conducts with a sure hand
February 2023
Top 10s
Top 10 imaginary journeys in literature
Disobeying the injunction to write only ‘what you know’, authors from Bram Stoker to Virginia Woolf have created rich fictional adventures into the unknown
January 2023
Nurse! My pen! Hanif Kureishi’s hospital musings and the art of sickbed writing
The author has published 10,000 words since being left paralysed – about the able-bodied, sexual positions and racist taunts. From Hilary Mantel to Audre Lorde, we look at how illness changes a writer
May 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 novels about neighbours
From commune-dwellers to lodgers in miniature, the people we live alongside make intriguing subjects for fiction
December 2021
Colm Tóibín: ‘Boris Johnson would be a blood clot … Angela Merkel the cancer’
The acclaimed novelist on chemotherapy, growing up gay in Ireland and writing his first poetry collection at the age of 66
September 2021
The Magician by Colm Tóibín review – a difficult Mann to know
Book of the day
The Magician by Colm Tóibín review – inside the mind of Thomas Mann
March 2021
From the Guardian archive
Death in Venice: 'a slow, precise, and beautiful film' – archive, 1971
4 March 1971 There are times when Luchino Visconti scarcely seems concerned about moving the story onwards
January 2021
Notebook
The cupboard looks increasingly bare for Marcus Rashford’s detractors
Tim Adams
Those who fought against the campaign for free school meals should be shamed by families’ miserly food parcels
November 2020
'It had been on my shelf for years': readers share their lockdown reads
Publishers report that coronavirus has boosted sales of long, classic novels. You reveal the great baggy monsters you’ve found the time to tackle
May 2020
The end of coronavirus: what plague literature tells us about our future
From Thucydides to Camus, there are plenty of hopeful reminders that there’s nothing unprecedented about the coronavirus lockdown - and that pandemics do end
March 2020
Lockdown reading
Tackle that to-be-read pile: the books to try if you're self-isolating
From Nora Ephron to Thomas Mann, here are 12 books to entertain, challenge and inspire if you’re confined at home due to Covid-19
February 2020
Other lives
Gigi Crompton obituary
Other lives: Botanist and author of the Cambridgeshire Flora Records Since 1538
November 2019
Death in Venice review – Britten's opera dazzles and glows
Mark Padmore’s impressive central performance powers David McVicar’s luxurious if earthbound revival of Britten’s final opera
November 2018
Top 10s
From Roth to Le Guin: top 10 novels about the first world war
Authors such as Virginia Woolf and Pat Barker show how the conflict’s devastating impact carried on long after the 1918 armistice
August 2018
Reading group
Reading group: which novel set on holiday should we read this month?
Learning German is just the job for savvy millennials
February 2018
On my radar
On my radar: Richard Sennett’s cultural highlights
The American sociologist on gardening, the Open Britain campaign and Janáček’s quartets
October 2017
Brief letters
Who says Americans have no sense of irony?
Brief letters: Sexual harassment | Nepotism | Autism | Difficult books | Loos of yore | Thatcher’s ‘mystery starter
June 2017
Blue Self-Portrait by Noémi Lefebvre review – sex, art and neurosis
Schoenberg’s music, Thomas Mann’s writing and the aftermath of Nazism overlap in an ingenious novel brimming with ideas
