business

Worm charming ‘The sheer madness of it is the appeal’ Each year around May, people flock to the village of Blackawton in Devon. Divided into teams of three, they are given a plot of land measuring 3m x 3m. While their dignity is sometimes lost in the process, ferocious bangs to the ground, war cries, … Read more

Born in London, where she still lives, to an artist mother and musician father, Netia Jones is the new associate director of the Royal Opera. Known for using immersive installations, film and VR, her operas include Alice in Wonderland, Least Like the Other with Brian Irvine, which won the Ivor Novello best opera award, and … Read more

It started with an impulsive eBay purchase. When Lee Shulman received the box of vintage slides he had bought from an anonymous seller, the British visual artist and film-maker could not believe the treasure he had accidentally uncovered. Beyond the impeccable quality of each image, taken in the 1950s by unnamed photographers, these were glimpses … Read more

“Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish … Read more

Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, Nobber, about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection Hostages, described … Read more

Inspiring teacher cliches abound in Mr Burton, a drab, slag-heap-grey drama about the early life of the actor Richard Burton (Harry Lawtey), born Richard Jenkins in industrial south Wales in 1925. The Burton of the title is not the hot-headed teenage aspiring actor who we meet bunking with his sister’s family in Port Talbot, but … Read more

In I am The Walrus, John Lennon told us: “Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe”. Lennon’s song, from the EP Magical Mystery Tour, is a two-fingered salute to academic efforts to impose an interpretative framework on the Beatles’ creativity. He wrote it after learning from a pupil at his ­former school … Read more

‘White Lotus’ Audience Is Big, and Keeps Getting Bigger

Steve McQueen felt relieved when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had no symptoms, was perfectly fit, at the peak of his game. Yet the Oscar-winning film-maker and artist believed it was inevitable. After all, his father had died from it, and he is a black man. The statistics speak for ­themselves. They are … Read more

My favourite Sara Pascoe joke is her imaginary riposte to people asking if she’s going to have kids. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said … Read more