Susannah Clapp

Here is​ an antidote to current traps and poisons. People who rescue rather than attack, who move in a physical, not a virtual, world, who don’t morally triage others. Who put themselves in danger without aiming to get famous or on television. Who risk their lives without being paid.

Dominic Gregory has worked as an adviser to literary estates, including Roald Dahl’s, and run a...

It is​ a fascinating and fawning exhibition. At the King’s Gallery (until 18 October) some three hundred items of clothing belonging to Queen Elizabeth II are displayed – headless, limbless, fleshless – like the remains of extinct animals. Norman Hartnell supplies silky flamboyance and encrustations: lace re-embroidered with sequins and crystals. Hardy Amies, fresh from a...

Little magazines​: big guns. It is hard to overestimate the high hopes and strong feelings swirling around papers which are small in funds and circulation but large in aspiration. For a time the London Review of Books might have been considered a little magazine: uncertain of its future but clear it wanted to put a spoke in the Falklands War. The Little Review, thought to have originated...

Not exactly​ an addiction but a compulsion. When I started to write full-time about the theatre, I was fixated on television soaps. Not all of them. I didn’t have an afternoon habit. Just EastEnders, which I had watched from the beginning (and failed to persuade the then editor would be a subject for this paper), Coronation Street and Brookside. I would come home from King Lear or the

Think​ of a loincloth as an act of diplomacy. The beautiful, fact-crammed catalogue accompanying the British Museum’s Hawaii exhibition (until 25 May) explains that the malo loloa, a long loincloth made of barkcloth, was a metaphor for Hawaii forming alliances. When, just over two hundred years ago, the young King Liholiho (known as Kamehameha II) and Queen Kamāmalu sailed from...