Chris Smith Articles

The good news: it was a speech Tony Blair could easily have given. The semi-approving invocation of Margaret Thatcher, the silence where Labour’s past ought to be, the promise to break down old institutions and reorient public services: it was all there. Now for the...

I used to think of it as the 'two o’clock awkward': that moment in conversation, usually late at night, often in the junior common room or someone’s room, when I realised that the person I was talking to had a completely different background and outlook to mine. Boris...

I can’t recall exactly when I first saw Mark Rothko’s Black on Maroon – an unsettling, bleak and profoundly beautiful series of paintings originally commissioned for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York – but I can remember my reaction.  As a writer, to describe...