Brief Lives (after John Aubrey)

There are at least three possible portraits of Isaac Newton. Traditional internalist historians of science depict him as an aloof scholar, remote from the world, solving in his Cambridge ivory...

The scene-setting picture of Bowie at home featured black candles and doodled ballpoint stars meant to ward off evil influences. Bowie revealed an enthusiasm for Aleister Crowley’s system of ceremonial magick that seemed to go beyond the standard, kitschy rock star flirtation with the ‘dark side’ into a genuine research project.

Imagine you are hired, fresh out of college at the age of 24, as tutor to the teenage daughter of the chancellor of the exchequer. His wife is away in the country much of the time; he wanders...

Virginia Woolf once said that biographies fail because the subject of the biography always goes missing (lost under the welter of the life). In this case, it is madness that goes missing because Woolf is never allowed to go missing from herself.

Paula Rego’s best works look at politics askance – at power and repression, at the darkness between and within individuals. Growing up under a dictatorship, in a country whose oral tradition of song and stories was exuberantly sinister, gave her all the atmospheric politics she needed in order to conjure work that is unafraid to give a face to cruelty.

We don’t admire​ Simone Weil because we agree with her, Susan Sontag argued in 1963. What we admire is her extreme seriousness, her absolute effort to become ‘excruciatingly identical with her ideas’.  Her life is the ground that gives her thinking its full meaning.

In the guise of natural theology, Malthusian political economy soon became the common sense of a middle class brought up to see the world as fallen and life as a trial: scarcity was ordained by providence, nature rewarded self-denial, and the market provided spiritual if not material gratification.

On a bitter cold morning in January 1939 Auden and Isherwood sailed into New York harbour on board the SS Champlain. After coming through a blizzard off Newfoundland the ship looked like a wedding cake and the mood of our two heroes was correspondingly festive and expectant.