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Nov 19, 2024 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Christopher Bray
Edwin Frank is the editorial director of the imprint NYRB Classics The Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate was in the news recently, for suggesting that students can no longer cope with long books. He said that while today’s undergraduates could just about get through Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (128 pages in the Penguin Modern Classics edition), The Grapes of Wrath (544 pages) would be beyond them. “Forty years [ago],” Bate went on, “you could say to students, ‘This week it’s Dickens, so...
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Oct 22, 2024 | 
thecritic.co.uk | Christopher Bray
This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10. If the definition of a movie star is an actor you’ll watch in anything, Elizabeth Taylor was the most stellar star of them all. In a career lasting more than half a century she made just one picture which would be worth watching were she not in it.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Christopher Bray
The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant and the Ultimate Nature of Reality Pushkin, pp.338, 25 It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage.
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Oct 9, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Christopher Bray
It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer to descant on the biggest of big-shot debates – what The Rigor of Angels’s subtitle calls ‘the Ultimate Nature of Reality’.True, William Egginton can’t match Stoppard for punchy one-liners, nor for puns and pratfalls and persiflage. But while his book is as demanding a read as anything published this year, it still leaves you smiling.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Christopher Bray
02 October 2024, The TabletRapturously absorbingNovel of the WeekGet Instant AccessContinue ReadingRegister for free to read this article in fullSubscribe for unlimited accessFrom just £30 quarterly Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content. The full weekly edition in print and digital including our 179 years archive. PDF version to view on iPad, iPhone or computer. Already a subscriber? Login
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Christopher Bray
Nazi horrors cannot necessarily be attributed to individual pathologies, and Donald Trump’s propaganda techniques are similar to Goebbels’ Get Instant AccessRegister for free to read this article in fullSubscribe for unlimited accessFrom just £30 quarterly Complete access to all Tablet website content including all premium content. The full weekly edition in print and digital including our 179 years archive. PDF version to view on iPad, iPhone or computer. Already a subscriber? Login
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Ben Domenech |Owen Matthews |sexyBy Christopher Bray |Christopher Bray
There are multiple reports, still unconfirmed at the moment but from reliable sources, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will end his independent candidacy at an event this Friday in Phoenix, Arizona. If so, regardless if he decides to throw his support behind Donald Trump, it will serve as a politically meaningful boost to the Republican campaign in multiple battleground states where Kennedy has gained ballot access in the past few months.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Owen Matthews |sexyBy Christopher Bray |Christopher Bray |Edward Howell
A Russian friend speaking from Kursk tells me the latest war joke. Vladimir Putin summons Stalin’s ghost. “Comrade Stalin!” asks Putin. “German tanks are in Kursk again. I need your advice.” Stalin’s ghost ponders before answering. “Do what I did.
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Aug 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Bray |Edward Howell |Katja Hoyer |sexyBy Christopher Bray
You must remember this… Harry Morgan is leaning on the bar wondering how the femme fatale and her wounded freedom fighter husband are doing. Then Slim walks in, wearing two wisps of black satin linked by a hoop around her navel. Harry tells her it’s time he checked on his patient. “Give her my love,” says Slim. “I’d give her my own,” says Harry, “if she were wearing that.” And in real life, as the tabloids would say, he did.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Damian Thompson |Christopher Bray |Justin Marozzi |Harry Cluff
The Hollywood adaptation of Conclave, Robert Harris’s thriller about a conspiracy to rig a papal election, won’t be in cinemas until November. But judging by the trailer released this summer, its starry cast, crafty plot and spectacular cinematography — jets of smoke scattering cardinals as an explosion shatters the Sistine Chapel — will instantly erase memories of The Two Popes, Netflix’s risible Oscar-nominated fantasy in which Benedict XVI secretly chooses Cardinal Bergoglio as his successor.
