It says a lot for the late, great Sir Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86, that it is entirely possible for two wholly separate contingents of his fanbase to mourn his death. The first, of course, are those who followed his distinguished theatrical career, which spanned several decades and saw him attempt most of the major Shakespearean roles, all of which he played with his customary brio and charisma. And the second are those who followed him to infinity and beyond as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek star and inspiration to millions with his award-winning portrayal of quiet, steadfast decency. Forget the womanizing and self-regard of William Shatner’s Kirk; Picard was, for another generation, the captain of the starship Enterprise.

Stewart was, in his own modest estimation, a bald, working-class Yorkshireman who got phenomenally lucky, but this is untrue. He managed a successful Hollywood career for decades – in addition to Picard, he was also Professor Xavier in the X-Men films, and will be making what is sadly his swansong appearance in Avengers: Doomsday this Christmas – and combined this with critically acclaimed work on stage for the RSC and in America. But what he was so good at was an effortless versatility that meant that he could come across as charming, threatening, Machiavellian or humble – sometimes all at once – which meant that producers, directors and writers knew that to cast him in their projects was to be given a wonderful gift. He was not an easy man, as he was happy to admit, and both his personal and professional lives were not free of conflict. But when he was on song, which he was often, there were few actors of his generation who could touch him.

Star Trek made him rich and famous, of course, and he dealt with the respect and adulation that his best-known role brought him with the good humour and self-effacement that many veteran actors who become successful late in life display. Even for those who were not natural sci-fi fans, his Picard – authoritative and charismatic, yes, but also winningly human – was a fine reason to watch the show, and Stewart, who reprised the role as recently as 2023, relished the opportunity to play an intergalactic version of Horatio Hornblower, and approached the part with swashbuckling zeal. It is hard to think of any actor who played a role of such longevity with such conviction and talent, and his enormous popularity at fan conventions was testament to how beloved he was.

But he never turned his back on his first love, the stage, and continued to perform well after his enviable bank balance would have led less committed actors to take it easier. I was fortunate enough to see him perform many of the great Shakespearean roles – Claudius, Prospero, Antony, Shylock – and would have loved to have seen his legendary performance as Macbeth. He was electrifying whenever he stood in a theatre, being possessed both of a rare degree of presence and a self-taught intelligence that meant that he could portray virtually any classical part with a deep understanding that never curdled over into milking it for cheap sympathy.

He performed several times with his X-Men co-star Ian McKellen, most notably in Pinter’s No Man’s Land and Waiting for Godot, and the two became associated with one another in the public imagination. Yet unlike the privately educated Cambridge graduate McKellen, Stewart’s humble background – he used to recall reading the complete works of Shakespeare in the outdoor bathroom of his childhood home – meant that his extraordinary achievements, both as an actor and as a man, were all the more incredible.

I had my own brief brush with Stewart, too, which was infinitely more rewarding than any interview could ever have been. A few years ago, he was kind enough to say that he was reading and enjoying my book The Windsors at War in an interview, which led my publisher and I to send him an advance copy of its successor, Power and Glory, in the hope that he would offer it an endorsement. Not only did he happily do this – offering the wonderful quote “if you want to better understand England and the English people, read this book” – but he had the generosity to send me an inscribed copy of his own memoir, Making It So, at his own expense. He did not have to do this, as countless other people of his fame would not have bothered, but it was typical of his decency and, yes, greatness that he was prepared to do so.

Hollywood, Britain and everywhere that Stewart graced with his presence and talent have lost a true knight, and he will be mourned. But at least we were fortunate enough to be graced by a great actor for decades, and, for that, we should remain grateful.

The news that the Duke of York’s theatre in London has been renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre - putting him in an exalted company that includes Harold Pinter and Noël Coward, but not, for some reason, Terence Rattigan - is an extremely welcome tribute to a great man whose death last year saw the demise of not just the world’s greatest living playwright, …

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Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the enjoyable task of revising Lazarus for the paperback edition. Usually I don’t do very much when it comes to my books’ second publication, but this time around I’ve corrected some of the errors of fact and repetition in the text (thank you, anyone who pointed any of these out - I am in your debt), added an epilogue that deals both with the book’s reception and many of the Bowie-related goings-on that have taken place this year, as well as some of the discoveries I’ve made in the V & A’s Bowie archive, and - perhaps most gratifyingly from an ego perspective - put together a sample of reviews and endorsements that I’ve received from a mixture of critics and readers for the front and back covers.

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You forget the nose. It is testament to Adrian Lester’s peerless, awards-worthy performance as the eponymous Cyrano de Bergerac — poet, swashbuckler and romantic coward — that, within a few moments of his taking to the stage, you look beyond Cyrano’s undoubtedly considerable schnozz and concentrate instead on this quite exceptional staging of Rostand’s …

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Now that Christopher Nolan’s new film of The Odyssey is slashing and intriguing its way through cinemas, it is inevitable that critics will compare his picture to the work of David Lean. This is, naturally, a comparison that Nolan himself has courted, as he has done throughout his career. The shadow of Lean lies large over many contemporary filmmakers, …

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So, after fevered speculation, Andy Burnham has cried havoc and let slip the dogs of war. He has now confirmed — to precisely nobody’s surprise — that, having been victorious in Makerfield and duly been sworn in as an MP (complete with well-timed riposte to the heckle “You’re not the messiah”, when he responded “No, I’m a naughty boy”) his intention is …

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A couple of months ago, I bought a copy of John Milton’s Comus on eBay. It was a particularly lovely edition of one of my favourite books. Illustrated by the great Blair Hughes-Stanton, whose work I’ve been collecting for a while now, and published by the small independent Welsh private press Gregynog, it was a real highlight and worth the (reasonably m…

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In 2005, I saw a revival of Simon Gray’s play Otherwise Engaged, a comedy of manners about a publisher attempting to spend an afternoon listening to Parsifal but being interrupted by a variety of people who want something from him. I am unconvinced that it is a great play, despite being both witty and affecting in quintessential Gray style, but it boast…

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I haven’t been to the cinema, at the time of writing, in about two months. The last picture I saw there was Project Hail Mary, which I enjoyed very much without having any particular desire to see it again. A couple of weeks ago, I briefly considered going to see The Devil Wears Prada 2 one wet Wednesday evening, and then decided to watch a couple of ep…

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The return of Sir Gary Oldman to the London stage, after an absence of nearly forty years, is an extraordinary coup for the Royal Court. Of all the leading actors of his generation, only Daniel Day-Lewis continues to remain a theatrical refusenik, and given he’s hardly seen on screen either, this is wholly understandable. But Oldman turned his back on a…

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Ten years after his premature demise aged 69, David Bowie, the Thin White Duke himself, remains as seductive a figure as he has ever been. Appropriately enough, 2026 celebrates him in some style. Visitors to London can visit his recently opened childhood home in Bromley; head eastwards to the David Bowie Centre at the V & A East, which features his pers…

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This is a version of a piece that I was delighted to write for the current issue of The Critic.

A.E. Housman once ate a hedgehog. The unfortunate creature is not the usual diet of poets and classici…

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The question I am probably asked more than any other by aspirant writers is “how do I get published?” The answer I would like to give is “by having an original idea that only you can write, and through combining talent, flair and perseverance.” This is, however, not entirely true. The actual answer is “by getting hold of the services of a literary agent who thinks that they can sell your book for a sufficiently large sum of money to make it worth their while to take you on as a client.” And that, depressingly, says everything you need to know about contemporary publishing.

It is not impossible to produce a non-fiction book without a literary agent, but the odds are not in your favour if you want it to sell in any kinds of quantities or receive any sort of publicity. It’s even harder to get a novel noticed, simply because very few, if any, publishing houses will touch an unagented author, which means in turn that it is unlikely to be stocked by bookshops or reviewed widely. This might sound unfair - it is unfair - but this is also a reflection of the world of books as things stand. Gatekeepers rule supreme, and a great deal of power lies within their hands, whether you like the status quo or not.

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A little light reading for Easter Monday, of a piece that I wrote earlier this year for the excellent new US literary magazine Portico. I haven’t yet read Nina Allan and Christopher Priest’s new biography The Illuminated Man, but am very much looking forward to doing so.

Shepperton, where the author James Graham “J. G.” Ballard lived from 1960 until his…

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I recently parted ways with my literary agent. It was not wholly unexpected - I had been talking to other potential suitors for a considerable time beforehand - but it was still something of a surprise that we broke up in the wake of what has been, by some distance, my greatest critical and commercial success as a writer. However, as he said in his (fairly comprehensive) farewell email, the relationship between an author and an agent is based on many things, but the most important is trust. When that is gone, on either side, there is little else to be achieved from a professional relationship. While we may have limped on together for a few unhappy months, the writing was very much on the wall.

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When the novelist Richard Yates, who was born in February 19…

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There has been no other 2026 film so buried in The Discourse as Emerald Fennell’s latest, “Wuthering Heights”. Yes, the title is in inverted commas, because, you see, this is very much its divisive director’s interpretation of Emily Brontë’s literary classic, rather than a remotely faithful adaptation. Which gives Fennell carte blanche to bring in all k…

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I read a piece by Ceci Browning in last weekend’s Sunday Times with a combination of interest and mounting dread. Entitled ‘There’s a crisis in non-fiction publishing. Who’s to blame’, the feature revealed that we’re buying 17 million fewer non-fiction books than we were six years ago. Those interviewed for the article suggest that a variety of kinds of non-fiction have already died, or are about to die, largely because of the inexorable rise of podcasts. Mark Richards, of the independent Swift Press, told Browning that “To be honest, biography has been going for the last 30 years. I mean, there was a time when a biography of a writer or an artist might actually top the charts. But the last time I could think about that happening was Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. That was, like, 15 years ago.”

There is a general sense of hopelessness in the industry, expressed in the article by Toby Mundy, literary agent at Aevitas. Mundy represented two of my favourite non-fiction titles of the past few years - Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood and Ian Leslie’s John and Paul - but he sees basic problems with writing non-fiction, saying “It’s very hard to finance the creation of one of those magisterial books just from a book advance unless you’re incredibly famous. That’s why many of the people writing those books are academics, because they need to be paid by their jobs to do the research. It’s otherwise economically unviable. The big blockbuster work is becoming harder to achieve.”

Mundy, as an agent, has to be optimistic, and states that “the platform is important, but it’s not as important as being the right book by the right author at the right time. And if the subject matter is good enough and the book is well executed enough, then it doesn’t matter if you’re famous or not famous.” I wish I shared his Panglossian attitude. Instead, I took grim succour from Leith’s article in The Spectator this week about non-fiction, where he discussed the way in which podcasts have largely supplanted books - largely because they’re free, and relatively easy to listen to. He writes that “I don’t think even a very good podcast can impart the depth of knowledge a book can. But it can certainly give the illusion of it. And, of course, these podcasts rely for their content on the very books whose production they are making impossible.” He concludes, gloomily, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a podcaster stamping on a shelf of books – for ever.”

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Recently, Richard Curtis paid tribute to the late Alan Rickman, on the tenth anniversary of the actor’s death, and revealed that Rickman had been Curtis’s first choice for the lead role in Four Weddings and a Funeral. He said that “It’s a pretty open secret that when three of us had the final vote for who should play the lead in Four Weddings and a Fune…

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Here’s perhaps my most personal piece about what it was like to write Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie. It appeared in Prospect the weekend before last - thanks to my excellent editor Pete Hoskin - and now I hope that you enjoy reading it here.

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