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MARCUS BERKMANN: I don't love all pop. It's these prejudices, more than the enthusiasms, that make me want to write about pop across the world. Who wants to know about the good stuff?
Jeremy Bowen writes powerfully and sensibly, as always (“The war that cannot be won”, 28 May). I only met Benjamin Netanyahu once over breakfast in Israel shortly before he became prime minister, and I took an instant dislike to him – bombastic, vain, and histrionic. As he faces serious criminal charges, the outside world must hope that Yair Lapid succeeds in building an alternative coalition government, however doubtful that looks. When I was a student in the late Fifties, many spent their vacations volunteering on a kibbutz, but no longer, as Israel has slipped from being a cause to ...
Representational image only Cricket is a funny game, and you would imagine that it is a rich field for comic writers. When the Scot Donald Cameron sees the following headlines in newspapers in England, he is almost “numb with the cold of sheer panic.” England Overwhelmed With Disaster, says one. Is England Doomed? asks another. A late edition mentions the Collapse of England. Cameron soon discovers the truth. This is not about a war or an attack by aliens. It is the “sad story of England’s shame in the second Test match against Australia at Melbourne.” England, Their England...
Wisden 2021 What's in Wisden 2020? Not since the Second World War has cricket faced a crisis like it. In 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic left no corner of the game untouched, and Wisden reports on its juddering impact – from Test arena to school field. In in 2021 edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, Duncan Hamilton reflects on an unprecedented and unsettling English summer, while Test spinner Jack Leach reveals what life was really like inside the biosecure bubble. Marcus Berkmann finds surprising solace on the village green. It was also a year in which cricket glimpsed itself in the mir...
Having lived here on and off for a couple of years, I have become quietly confident that it never snows in Brighton. A few days ago someone dear to me sent a video of what looked like a Narnian blizzard in the DH7 postal district (that’s the north-east, County Durham to you). “Is it snowing where you are?” she asked. “It never snows in Brighton,” I said. “Something to do with the sea. And being in the south.” Well, guess what I’m looking at now. One should never extrapolate from incomplete data. I am reminded of the wonderfully nerdy joke about the astronomer, the physicist ...