Claire Allfree

Populism has always been fuelled by ‘dissatisfaction and discontent’, says the classical historian

The other day Mary Beard was reading an interview with the actor Simon Farnaby who appeared as a footman alongside the late Queen Elizabeth in the Platinum Jubilee Paddington Bear video

Michael Nott’s unsanctimonious biography of Thom Gunn, A Cool Queer Life, draws out his complexities and contradictions

I first read his great novel Decline and Fall aged 16. Yes, his books contain appalling, hypocritical characters – that’s exactly the point

“Is London ready for Slave Play?” asks the booking website for the London transfer of Jeremy O Harris's drama about race, sexuality and the psychological legacy of slavery.

Hannah Fry has a secret weapon when it comes to election predictions. “Betting sites,” she says triumphantly. “People voting with their money is information.

As chief number cruncher on Channel 4’s election coverage, the mathematician says that the data can tell the story of a nation

It's not entirely impossible that someone in Tory HQ might, at some point in the last six weeks, have floated the idea of presenting Rishi Sunak as

Kendall Feaver's excellent new play, set at a present-day Oxbridge college, begins with a scene that recalls Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall.

At the Sheffield Crucible Theatre on a Wednesday afternoon before the election, a group of actors are running breathlessly around the perimeter of the stage. As one of them picks up speed, arms windmilling, a pulsing synthesiser beat fills the air, immediately recognisable to anyone who has watched Hugh Hudson 's 1981 film Chariots of Fire and, indeed, to many who haven't, so completely has Vangelis 's anthemic theme embedded itself in the national consciousness.