TV
The Birth of the Affluent Society
David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain, the fifth of his series of histories of Britain since 1945, reveals the late Fifties to be not a time of illiberalism and repression, but of a generosity of spirit
A Managerial, Not a Creative, Crisis
British television editors still live in the 1980s, where the world of Netflix and iTunes is a distant dream
Drama By Committee
Mayday showed the originality so often lacking in management-led and prescriptive British television
Excelling at the Mediocre
Middlebrow TV drama like Death in Paradise is what tired viewers want and British writers do best
No One’s Laughing
‘British comedy has gone from laughing with to laughing at: comedians no longer try to endear themselves to their audiences’
On the Hunt for Cheap Thrills
In broadcasting, as in literature, cynical writers devoid of self-belief are doomed to fail
Just Not Kosher
Jewish Mum of the Year is both offensive and fails to explain the vagaries of Jewish life without resorting to shameful stereotyping
The Cowardice of the Liberal Press
Hounded out of her native Norway by radical Islamists, Deeyah tells stories the leftist media dare not
Delusions Of Omnipotence
The BBC’s managers thought they could kill the Savile sex abuse story. Now it is coming back to haunt them
Tiptoeing in the Mecca Ballroom
Tom Holland’s film on the origins of Islam deserves praise for not shying away from controversy
Majority rule; minority rights
It is folly to treat UK race relations as totally divorced from the rest of human experience. We need to look at the larger global picture
American revolutions: Rewriting the language of the unheard
‘Dissenting viewpoints — for example, the belief that America is not an intrinsically racist country—are shunned as further proof of racist pathologies’
The favourites
From Piers Gaveston onwards, controversial courtiers have a long history in British politics.How unusual is Dominic Cummings?