At 68, Stephen Fry is finally the age he was meant to be. Even though he subscribes to the argument Cyril Connolly advances in Enemies of Promise, that privately educated schoolboys remain locked in a permanent adolescence, he has always been old.

At least that’s how it strikes those of us now in our sixties, who have aged with him. As dispassionate observers, we have watched him achieve ‘national treasure’ status, an honour bestowed on such disparate figures as Joanna Lumley and the Windrush generation, by those who decide such things. To them, Fry is as much an institution as the literary giants and characters that formed him: Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes and PG Wodehouse. Of the latter, Fry wrote, ‘in my teenage years, his writings awoke me to the possibilities of language’.

This year, Fry received a knighthood. It was inevitable but perhaps later than he, and the rest of us, expected, given he has been acquainted with the…

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In 2023, Pulp reformed, almost a quarter of a century after they released their last album and subsequently disbanded. Now the new music is coming.

In April this year, they released ‘Spike Island’, a single which has the anthemic feel of their most famous song, ‘Common People’, from their fifth album, the Mercury Music Prize winner Different Class (1995). This week, their new album, More, arrived.

Both single and album are a return to the original Pulp sound – minus bassist Steve Mackey, who died in 2023. They are exactly what a band with an impressive back catalogue and a 61-year-old vocalist might produce in order to remain dignified, while unmistakably ancient. Cocker sings: ‘I was born to perform / It’s a calling / I еxist to do this / Shouting and pointing.’

This is the reason for the return – to entertain. To do what Cocker envisaged doing as a 15-year-old Sheffield schoolboy in 1978, when he mapped out the Pulp masterplan in a beige exercise book during an economics lesson. The vision came to fruition with the formation of Pulp. Success arrived later, after a series of false dawns, and peaked with the renowned ‘Common People’. The song was inspired by Cocker’s stint as a student at Saint Martin’s School of Art, during a sabbatical from the group at the end of the 1980s.

With this career being his calling, it was unlikely that Jarvis Cocker would disappear when Pulp disbanded, despite his ambivalent response to fame when it finally came in the mid-1990s. He has hosted radio shows, authored the memoir and Sunday Times bestseller, Good Pop, Bad Pop (2022), and released solo albums. His hair is now greying, he’s close to pensionable age. The signature spectacles remain, as does the lanky gait that contributed to his image as a gangly, quirky frontman rather than a controversial one.

The drug references in the 1995 single ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’, and on the accompanying sleeve, may have led to a Daily Mirror campaign to ban the single. But Cocker was no provocateur. The following year, when he jumped on stage at the Brit Awards and disrupted Michael Jackson’s performance, he garnered support from the very same Daily Mirror. The newspaper organised a ‘Justice for Jarvis’ campaign following his arrest by the police. The stunt was a prank, rather than a protest or a political statement. The attention the event attracted led to him disappearing from the public realm into the recording studio to compose the darker songs on This Is Hardcore (1998).

Ahead of the release of More, Pulp did make a stab at contemporary relevance. The band added its name to the petition defending the ‘freedom of expression’ of rappers Kneecap, after counter-terrorism officers began investigating the Irish trio when footage emerged of them shouting ‘up Hamas, up Hezbollah’ at a gig, and urging fans to kill their local MPs. The petition signing was the type of performative activism more associated with some of Cocker’s fellow musicians, a few of whom make strange bedfellows in their support for Kneecap (Paul Weller, Massive Attack, Thin Lizzy).

The politics of some of Cocker’s pop peers are as predictable as they are inevitable. Signing a petition to prevent a pro-Palestine rap group from being censored is a safe move, compared with, say, speaking up for people who have been cancelled or arrested for speaking out against Islamism or the transgender lobby. The signatories seem to imagine that Kneecap are akin to the Sex Pistols, when they are probably closer to Chumbawamba. For elder statesmen of the music industry, Kneecap’s existence reignites the ‘activism’ of their youth before the world changed but they didn’t.

Although there have been two reunion tours in the intervening years, along with the single ‘After You’ in 2013, this is the first new album from Pulp since the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life in 2001. Cocker and his bandmates are now in the twilight stage of their career, heading towards the demographic he sings about in ‘Help The Aged’ (1998): ‘One time they were just like you / Drinking, smoking cigs and sniffing glue.’

Pop music is now in its dotage and has seen it all, and seen it repeatedly. So what do the practitioners of this elderly art sing about when composing pop songs in their golden years? ‘Are there unique qualities of perception and form that artists acquire as a result of age in the late phase of their career?’, asks Edward Said in On Late Style (2006). Published after the academic and critic died aged 67, the work asks if artists acquire a new idiom in later years. ‘But what of artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty and contradiction? What if age and ill health don’t produce serenity at all?’ Said brings in Beethoven and Wagner to back up his contention. But is this equally true of pop musicians that came to prominence in their twenties? Do they develop an idiomatic late style while keeping the music going in their sixties (Paul Weller, Jarvis Cocker, Morrissey) and even their seventies (David Byrne, Neil Tennant)?

Not in the case of Pulp. Just as their sound feels like the hits of the past served up in the present, the lyrics on the forthcoming album are a return to similar territory. The titles ‘My Sex’, ‘Grown Ups’, ‘The Hymn Of The North’ could have appeared on the 1994 breakthrough album, His ’n’ Hers. Back then Cocker sang about joyriders and leisure centres, with a crude and juvenile approach to sex throughout this and the albums that followed. On ‘Acrylic Afternoons’ he sings: ‘On a pink quilted eiderdown I want to pull your knickers down / Net curtains blowing slightly in the breeze / Lemonade light filtering through the trees.’ Four years later on the single, ‘This Is Hardcore’, sex keeps its furtive, youthful allure: ‘It seems I saw you in some teenage wet dream.’ It’s all in keeping with the experience of a boy who came of age in England’s former ‘Steel City’ in the 1970s, and fits with a peculiarly British mood and sensibility.

Pulp’s return comes as those collectively classified as ‘Britpop’ back in the 1990s have also re-emerged. This pop-musical trend was part of the ‘Cool Britannia’ moment that coincided with Labour reacquainting itself with power after 18 years in the wilderness. Then prime minister Tony Blair, erstwhile guitarist and vocalist in rock band Ugly Rumours, courted the Britpoppers at Downing Street soirées.

The unholy alliance of musicians with New Labour was even less likely than that which occurred in the final decade of old Labour, following Michael Foot losing an election with a manifesto described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’. In 1985, musicians calling themselves Red Wedge, including the likes of Paul Weller, united in an attempt to take on a Tory government in its second term. The campaign galvanised student activists who discovered the punk phenomenon years after the event, and who were no doubt radicalised by a Billy Bragg B-side. With a ‘Rock Against Racism’ badge pinned to their t-shirt-coated hearts, they took to the Red Wedge tour like Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace. In doing so, they played a small part in keeping the Conservatives in power following the 1987 election. It took another 10 years for a rebranded Labour Party to finally make it back to No10, just as Britpop was heading up the charts to No1.

In December 1996, Cocker received a telephone call from a Labour apparatchik, close to the Islington set that circled the leader. Would he publicly endorse New Labour? Not only did he agree, he also delayed the release of the song, ‘Cocaine Socialism’, because he felt it might deter voters from voting Labour and bringing it to power, such was his deluded belief in his pull and influence at that point. It was released in 1998, a year after Blair was safely home and dry in Downing Street.

Now the Labour Party has returned to power after a shorter stay in the wilderness (a mere 14 years). And the original reluctant heroes of Britpop have resurfaced. Blur emerged with a new album in 2023. Suede have been in and out of pop’s consciousness throughout this century. The announcement that Oasis were to get back together and tour this summer was hardly unexpected. Since the band split, the singalong songs from their high season have remained on the lips of fans in pubs, on stag nights and in football stands. Many a male Oasis devotee has matured into a husband and father, rather like the heavy-drinking, hard-living brothers they idolised at the time of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?.

The bands with Brett (Suede), Damon (Blur) and Jarvis to the fore were perhaps of a different ilk, with a more alternative following. The Christian names of the men were a clue to the artiness associated with parents who were perhaps less culturally working class than those of the Gallagher brothers. Jarvis Cocker’s father deserted the family to become a DJ in Australia; his mother sent her son to school in lederhosen, and raised him on a diet of BBC programming, refusing to let her children watch ITV.

Despite coming of age in a home in which adverts and the Rovers Return were absent, Cocker’s lyrics were nonetheless inspired by the lives of those who watched commercials and Coronation Street. He invested provincial places and events, along with artefacts and disposable consumer durables, with a potency and even a poignancy. History, culture and England were here. But it was a more comical and Carry On take compared with the melancholy ache evident in the songs of, say, the Smiths; that longing for a lost England we wanted to escape at the time but embraced when it was gone. The author Olivia Laing has written that in composing songs about bus depots and corner shops, sexual fantasy and sexual failure, Cocker ‘imbued the Sheffield suburbs of Catcliffe, Ecclesall and the Wicker with the same seedy glamour as Serge Gainsbourg’s Montmartre’.

Eventually Cocker embraced the city of Gainsbourg, after marrying the French fashion stylist, Camille Bidault-Waddington. A far cry from the suburb of Intake, South Yorkshire, where he spent his formative years in Bavarian shorts. He remained in Paris after separating from Bidault-Waddington in 2009, and later raised his head above the parapet and aired his views on politics and current affairs. What stirred him was not developments that put Paris in the headlines, such as the Islamist terrorist attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan theatre in 2015, but the result of a referendum on EU membership in Britain in 2016. ‘I was very vocally against that and still think it’s one of the most pathetic things ever, especially now’, he said in 2020. ‘There’s freedom of movement in Europe and it’s so sad that we’ve chucked that away. I’m a little bit bothered about people knowing that I’m English because it’s a bit embarrassing at the moment because of this psychotic thing we’re doing.’ The previous year he compared Brexit to having a record that failed to reach No1:

‘I’m mentioning the pop charts because I actually think they do shed some light on Brexit. And particularly on the validity of a second referendum. Because that referendum result is the equivalent to a single entering the UK Top 40 at 19.’

In these and similar interviews he failed to elaborate further on the rationale behind his stance on Brexit. Just as he failed to explain his support for pulling down statues and attending a Black Lives Matter march.

Although politics has not hitherto been dominant within Pulp’s output, class certainly has, ever since ‘Common People’ took them to the top end of the charts. The song was a response to the middle-class students Cocker met at art college, who wanted to ‘live like common people’. Much later, during an alfresco interview in Holland Park, when Cocker had left France, the reporter notes that his interviewee ‘doesn’t like the middle classes, so the Kensington mums are anathema to him’. Yet Cocker seemed to have little problem with the middle-class legions that jumped up and down on Black Lives Matter marches, pulling down statues, and dismissed those who voted to leave the European Union as ill-educated proles who didn’t have a university degree or attend an arts college.

During a speech at the NME awards in 2015, Cocker informed those assembled: ‘A long time ago, last century, we made a record and it was called Different Class. It wasn’t called working class, and it wasn’t called upper class and it wasn’t called middle class. It was called Different Class because, let’s get over that and move on to something else.’ But the middle and upper classes he once sang about have not got over it or moved on. Nor have the Labour Party people who once courted him in the 1990s or, indeed, those he recently aligned himself with in opposition to Brexit, and marched alongside on BLM protests. But they have certainly changed. They no longer want to live like common people, or sing along with the common people, because there is so much they now loathe about them. Notably, the very Brexity things.

Originally published in Spiked

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David Lynch believed that you could live in one place and have everything. This is how he remembered his early childhood in a cul-de-sac in the neighbourhood of Spokane, Washington.

The clues to the conflict that raged elsewhere, on foreign soil from the 1940s, was evident in the frequent murmur in the sky above. ‘These B52s would fly in a squadron,’ the director recalled. ‘They have a drone, and with all of them together the drones are kind of in harmony. It’s the most beautiful sound. And they’re not travelling so fast, so it takes a long time for them to travel across the sky: it’d be a summer day with drones of these giant B52s, and it’s just a beautiful, almost cosmic, dreamy mood.’ A variation on that non-musical din emerged as a motif in the soundscape of the films he wrote and directed, from Eraserhead in 1979 to his final feature, Inland Empire from 2006. A similar motif appears in the music he produced independent of his films. The…

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Gilbert and George object to the term ‘gentrification’ to describe the ongoing overhaul to the east London neighbourhood that has been their home for almost 60 years.

‘We think it’s classist and sexist, because you’d never say ladyfication. Or Jewification. Or blackification. Or Bangladeshification’, they once informed the Guardian, with their signature prankishness. ‘They’ve only got it in for white people. It’s punishing the honkies.’

The artists moved to Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets in 1968 and quickly occupied dilapidated basement rooms in a former Huguenot house on Fournier Street. More than half a century later, they remain at the same address, having bought the entire house in the 1970s. From here they adhere to the routine of work, walking and eating out, established early on, even though they are now in their 80s.

At one end of the road, ‘gentrification’ brings a Gotham City skyline to Liverpool Street; at the other, what survives from an earlier overhaul of the neighbourhood that began when Gilbert and George arrived in these parts, when ‘Bangladeshification’ succeeded the ‘Jewification’ that altered the neighbourhood from the end of the 19th century. The Brick Lane Jamme Masjid at one corner of Fournier Street was a synagogue from 1897, and originally a Huguenot chapel. Nearby Christ Church, the imposing 18th-century Anglican church designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, is a relic from an altogether different age. A recent development in the neighbourhood that brings the past, the present and the future together in one building is the Gilbert and George Centre, which opened in 2023 and occupies a former brewery. ‘All the museums now are woke’, they stated in 2021, which is one of the reasons they are funding a venture that will survive when they’ve gone – as a testament to their history on these streets and the works the locale inspired.

The art world continues to suffer from the condition of ‘woke’. As a consequence, the institutions also suffer from low attendance figures and diminishing revenue. Despite being elderly white men, Gilbert and George have not been sidelined, censored or silenced. From October this year until June 2026, London’s Hayward Gallery will exhibit a large selection of their 21st-century pictures.

The scale of the exhibition is a testament to their persistence and relevance (although it’s dwarfed by their major retrospective at Tate Modern in 2007). A recent Times Literary Supplement review of James Birch’s Gilbert and George and the Communists (2025), in which the author relays his experience of accompanying the artists to Russia and China in the 1990s, suggests Gilbert and George have been contemporary ‘for longer than almost anyone else’. It was at the Hayward Gallery in 1972 that they came to prominence, as part of The New Art show. They were as at odds with those who exhibited alongside them as they were with their fellow students at St Martin’s School of Art, where they met in 1967. They were opposed to the conceptualism that was in vogue. They wore suits. They insisted on good manners. ‘Two clean boys’, according to Gilbert, ‘with funny ideas behind the scenes’. They were, and remain, patriots, royalists and conservatives, while being pro-sexual-freedom and anti-religion. They often dismiss other artists as meaningless, and accuse them of not asking questions. ‘We are quite disillusioned with that kind of art ourselves. We want an art that is in your face’, Gilbert said in 2017. ‘We are confrontational.’ As other artists classified themselves as radicals railing against the establishment (which, incidentally, often funded them), Gilbert and George produced work that disturbed those on both the left and the right. ‘We want our art to bring out the bigot from inside the liberal and conversely bring out the liberal from inside the bigot’, they said in 2023.

The poster for the 1972 Hayward Gallery show features them in their staple tweedy suits, emerging from or disappearing into bushy foliage. It could almost be a double LP cover for the time. The work exhibited (‘The Shrubberies’) was a development on The General Jungle pictures that preceded it: floor-to-ceiling charcoal drawings in which the two men are solitary figures in nature’s wilderness. They described themselves as country boys, with George (Passmore) hailing from Devon, England and Gilbert (Proesch) a native of the mountainous Dolomites in northern Italy. It wasn’t until they embraced photography that they became urban artists, simultaneously creating the grid format to frame their montages that they use today. Their photographic works from the early 1970s capture them drunk at a Bethnal Green wine bar, or within the sterility of their home with its panelled walls and bare floorboards. The most enduring pictures focus on the everyday subjects that other artists discarded, whether it was the working-class locals, graffiti, headlines on newspaper stands and sex cards in phone boxes.

Collectively, their work provides a unique social document covering the changing nature of the East End – and London – that’s been described as subversive, shocking, tragic and comic. A common thread running through the work is those ancient East End streets the two young men navigated as odd interlopers, and now wander like disembodied figures or ghosts, forever indifferent to the changes they’ve been privy to for more than half a century.

When they moved there in 1968, swinging London was a rumour rather than a reality on these streets, but change was imminent. That other infamous local double act, the Kray twins, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms that year. A budding entrepreneur established the short-lived retail unit, ‘Cockneyland’, to transform the remnants of the urban, white working-class caricature associated with the area into a tourist attraction, with merchandise to match. The BBC returned East End natives, actress Georgia Brown and composer Lionel Bart, to their Jewish East End roots, in the midst of a modern diaspora, to address the question: ‘Who Are the Cockneys Now?’ It was also the year of Enoch Powell’s infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech.

The past was being demolished, but the future appeared to have failed before it got off the ground. The new east London tower block, Ronan Point, a glimpse of the housing of tomorrow, was blown apart by a gas explosion, which killed four residents. Still, the slum tenements survived from the Victorian era, which journalists and social anthropologists had reported on a century earlier, as authors Arthur Morrison and Jack London transposed their East End experience into novels that were heavy on Grand Guignol-style horror and gore, and light on the humanity of the inhabitants. These transient missionaries exposed the horrors; the local press overlooked them. As London wrote in The People of the Abyss(1903): ‘Late last night I walked along Commercial Street from Spitalfields to Whitechapel… And as I walked I smiled at the East End papers, which, filled with civic pride, boastfully proclaim that there is nothing the matter with the East End as a living place for men and women.’ A similar approach is relevant now, when the mainstream media report on the East End, and London generally, by rolling out the official mantra on multiculturalism. Purposely ignoring divisions that debunk the myth and worsen the reality, the more this defunct fantasy is perpetuated.

Shortly after their arrival in the East End in 1968, Gilbert and George embarked on their ‘Art For All’ vision. Perched on a table beneath a nearby railway viaduct surrounded by bomb sites, they performed ‘Underneath the Arches’, the song associated with local boy-made-good Bud Flanagan, who died that year. Bemused locals gathered like the small congregational groups that once surrounded preachers, salvationists and socialist orators on those streets, rather than two men in suits with painted silver faces. ‘The Singing Sculpture’ (1969), as the piece was entitled, propelled them into galleries in Europe and New York, making them the exhibit, a move that is central to their art. Recalling those early years, Gilbert has said: ‘This whole idea of making ourselves the centre of our art and trying to leave something behind, that was totally unusual.’

Despite the localised detail, the work has been shown in galleries throughout the globe, throughout the years, with Gilbert and George maintaining they are not indigenously London artists. The London natives among us, familiar with similar streets, along with many of those the couple have walked along, tend to disagree. The territory they document is unique because no other working-class area in east London, or south-east London, had been subjected to the successive waves of immigration, until now. The streets and buildings the artists photographed convey a mood and evoke memories for those whose history and ancestry is in these streets.

Arguably, Gilbert and George are in keeping with that tradition of writers and sociologists from the 19th century who delved into these netherworlds, except they only moved to the East End because they were ‘poor’ and remained because it was ‘romantic’. The duo observed, but rarely commented on, all they were witness to. This annoyed some critics, who accused them of exploitation and voyeurism – and, all too predictably, ‘racism’ and ‘fascism’.

If it’s true that they’ve been contemporary longer than anyone else, it’s perhaps because they held their nerve, and were always ahead of the curve. The culture has caught up with them, and as a consequence they are now attributed national-treasure status. A position that diminishes the impact of the work in the context of the time it was produced.

Some of us arrived at Gilbert and George through pop and fashion, rather than art. We were aware of these men in suits when, back in 1977, they were figures sometimes found at London punk clubs, gay clubs and the Blitz in Holborn, which soon attracted the theatrical new romantic crowd. The couple’s sartorial style pulled us towards art galleries; their work, which moved from monochrome to the vivid palette associated with Mondrian, Disney and stained glass, kept us returning. According to George: ‘When most people see our pictures they think the images are talking about themselves rather than us. They see their own lives in relation to the pictures.’ It was The Dirty Words Pictures (1977) that drew some of us in, with content and titles taken from local graffiti (‘Paki’, ‘Queer’, ‘Cunt’, ‘Scum’). Some of these insults were levelled at Gilbert and George by local natives when they first became Spitalfields residents (‘faggots’, ‘poofs’). Those of us who experienced similar during our formative years remember the culprits as boys we didn’t want to be. Boys we sometimes wanted, but never wanted to become.

Similar figures featured in works of Gilbert and George, who were criticised for essentially elevating these working-class subjects above their social class. Using a line-up of local young men in ‘Patriots’ (1980) led to charges of ‘racism’ from critics who failed to notice a Bangladeshi boy among them. The young white men in ‘Four Knights’ (1980) caused consternation. One particular gallery, exhibiting the picture years later, stated: ‘Its meaning is ambiguous, perhaps contrasting the alienation of modern youth with the heroes of medieval chivalry, but the reason for Gilbert and George’s interest is unclear, should these young men be admired or feared?’

Before national-treasure status beckoned and blurred the controversies of earlier years, those who embrace a cosmetic radicalism and controversy in the arts found Gilbert and George impossible to categorise. They were an antidote to the leftist outlook artists conformed to; they resisted being courted by the gay lobby. It was only when they targeted religion, and particularly Christianity, that liberal critics could truly let out a sigh of relief and comfortably shower them with praise. But perhaps Gilbert and George’s take on Christianity isn’t as simplistic as the views of the critics who welcomed it. Between the back yard of their house on Fournier Street and the studio it connects to, where they produce their pictures, there is an ancient stone fountain inscribed with a quote attributed to Jesus in the book of John: ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.’

In 2006, The Sonofagod Pictures were accompanied by the question, ‘Is Jesus heterosexual?’. No such statement was issued about the Prophet Muhammad in the series, but Gilbert and George have perhaps gone further than most successful artists when using imagery associated with Islam, which has become so prevalent in the East End and beyond. ‘Islam’ from London Pictures (2011) features the disembodied faces of Gilbert and George beneath authentic newspaper headlines (‘London “Islam” school teaches hate’; ‘Islam “insult” Briton faces lash’).

‘Maybe 10 years ago, all non-Muslim houses in the street were kicked in’, George revealed in a 2017 interview. ‘They used to say, “Fuck off out of this, this is a holy place”.’ This is part of a wider local trend that picked up momentum in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and according to Gilbert and George, when the imams moved into the East End. There were, and remain, attempts to make the neighbourhood a ‘no gay’ zone, with even a ‘Muslim patrol’ confronting gay men, anyone with alcohol, and women in vest tops and short skirts. In 2011, a 21-year-old artist friend of theirs, and another St Martin’s alumni, was set upon by a gang in a ‘homophobic’ attack that left him paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. The LGBT activist, Peter Tatchell, organised a march to address this issue. He wrote: ‘Earlier this year, stickers were plastered around East London declaring it a “Gay Free Zone”, warning that Allah’s punishment for homosexuality is severe.’

Art critic Jonathan Jones, who has written at length on Gilbert and George throughout the latter part of their career, maintains that their most truthful works are made when they are drawn to darker subjects. The Dirty Words Pictures were offensive and controversial to those on the left, while The Fundamental Pictures (1996), with titles such as ‘Spunk’ and ‘Piss’, were obscene to the more conservative art aficionado. The Naked Shit Pictures (1995) were comic to some, because two middle-aged male artists, famously forever in tweed suits, were suddenly naked with flaccid penises, parted arses, testicles heading towards the knees, and white y-fronts at ankle level.

But it’s perhaps the later works, particularly London Pictures (2011) and similar, that provide the most truthful account of what London has become – the modern Grand Guignol that has echoes as dark as that discovered by social anthropologists in the Victorian past. It is these that will be remembered as prescient, troubling and tragic.

Originally published in Spiked.

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‘I ain’t no regular singer’, declares Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, her critically acclaimed country-and-western album, released earlier this year. ‘Now come get everythin’ you came for.’

On Christmas Day, she will perform tracks from the album during halftime of the National Football League game between her hometown team, Houston Texans, and the Baltimore Ravens. It will be broadcast live on Netflix and available to the streaming service’s 280 million subscribers.

Those tuning in for Beyoncé’s half-time show will get a better deal than those fans who showed up to the Democrats’ rally in her native Texas in October, to watch her endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency. They got nothin’ of what they came for. They were short-changed by a brief speech in which Beyoncé (largely) mouthed the platitudes found on the lips of Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama throughout Harris’s campaign.

Beyoncé was far from the only superstar to throw her weight behi…

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It’s heartening to meet a public figure who opts for silence, detachment and tact. ‘I distance myself when I speak about things by not going into details about the immediacy of the here and now,’ André Aciman tells me.

In his view writers should not respond rashly to major news events, unless they’re reporters: ‘You have to give these events time to develop a new skin, before you write about them.’ If only other authors and celebrities were as restrained. So many speak out in pursuit of followers on social media, appeasing those who will mobilise and target them if they fail to hold the correct views. ‘I think an entirely intelligent person is always ambivalent,’ he says. ‘You have to be ambivalent because you can always see the two sides of the same thing.’

Throughout his works he refers to ‘vigils’ to describe the return to places from the past that bring a memory to life in the present. ‘This is how I always travel,’…

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