In the Multiverse

Jessica Olin: What Knox did next, 9 October 2025

Free: My Search for Meaning 
by Amanda Knox.
Headline, 283 pp., £22, March, 978 1 0354 2815 1
Show More
The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox 
produced by K.J. Steinberg.
Disney+, August
Show More
Show More
... Asked the Wrong Questions about Brittney Griner’ (Time); ‘Ghislaine Maxwell, Elizabeth Holmes and Me’ (Free Press). She sympathised with both Johnny Depp and Amber Heard over the way they were being tried in the court of public opinion. She also wrote well-researched and convincing pieces about defendants most people hadn’t heard ...

Akihito and the Sorrows of Japan

Richard Lloyd Parry: The Anxious Emperor, 19 March 2020

... a conventional education, at Gakushuin, Japan’s grandest school; among his English tutors was Elizabeth Vining, an American Quaker, who nicknamed him ‘Jimmy’. ‘His interests in those days were almost entirely confined to fish,’ she wrote later, ‘and I felt they needed broadening.’ The influence of this American pacifist on the young prince was ...

American Breakdown

David Bromwich, 2 August 2018

... The only Democratic leaders who are known to many Americans are Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and their combined age is 220. How did that happen? The Clinton-Obama dollar tree cast a shade for a quarter-century in which smaller political fortunes have struggled even to breathe. Meanwhile, the Democrats remain in denial about the charm of ...

I only want the OM

Christopher Tayler: Somerset Maugham, 1 September 2005

Somerset Maugham: A Life 
by Jeffrey Meyers.
Vintage, 411 pp., £12, April 2005, 1 4000 3052 8
Show More
Show More
... man in his life. Maugham eventually married Syrie for the child’s sake – their daughter, Elizabeth, was born in 1915 – but he continued to see Haxton. Gossip proliferated. Maugham, it was said, had taken to hiding behind the sofa whenever his ‘coarse and irritating’ wife was at home. Fanciful tales about the exotic arrangements required to ...

I adore your moustache

James Wolcott: Styron’s Letters, 24 January 2013

Selected Letters of William Styron 
edited by Rose Styron and R. Blakeslee Gilpin.
Random House, 643 pp., £24.99, December 2012, 978 1 4000 6806 7
Show More
Show More
... pages – the stellar cast includes Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Peter Matthiessen, Philip Roth, Irwin Shaw and the always vivacious William Burroughs (‘He is an absolutely astonishing personage, with the grim mad face of Savonarola and a hideously tailored 1925 shit-coloured overcoat ...

Heart-Squasher

Julian Barnes: A Portrait of Lucian Freud, 5 December 2013

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud 
by Martin Gayford.
Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., £12.95, March 2012, 978 0 500 28971 6
Show More
Breakfast with Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist 
by Geordie Greig.
Cape, 260 pp., £25, October 2013, 978 0 224 09685 0
Show More
Show More
... novelists: Kingsley Amis and Georges Simenon. When Amis’s second wife and fellow novelist, Elizabeth Jane Howard, saw him, at eleven o’clock on the morning he was due to lunch at Buckingham Palace, standing in the garden punishing an enormous whisky, she said, ‘Bunny, do you have to have a drink?’ He replied (and it was a reply that would have ...

Speak for yourself, matey

Adam Mars-Jones: The Uses of Camp, 22 November 2012

How to Be Gay 
by David Halperin.
Harvard, 549 pp., £25.95, August 2012, 978 0 674 06679 3
Show More
Show More
... in Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (first produced in 1962, filmed with Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in 1966), referring to a line spoken by Bette Davis in King Vidor’s 1949 film Beyond the Forest, and one man’s sexual desire for another? How is it that an Australian readership in 2000 can be expected to pick up these distant ...

Do you think he didn’t know?

Stefan Collini: Kingsley Amis, 14 December 2006

The Life of Kingsley Amis 
by Zachary Leader.
Cape, 996 pp., £25, November 2006, 0 224 06227 1
Show More
Show More
... relationship was finally put under intolerable strain when Amis started an affair with the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard. Almost immediately, this affair threatened to be different from its innumerable predecessors because Kingsley fell passionately in love with Jane. Hilly finally walked out on him; he and Jane set up together, marrying in 1965. This seems to ...

Unwritten Masterpiece

Barbara Everett: Dryden’s ‘Hamlet’, 4 January 2001

... juxtapositions reflect the changes and instabilities of the culture itself. Someone born under Elizabeth might, just possibly, have lived into Anne’s reign. The Restoration writer looks back to Donne and forward to Defoe. There is a gulf between, say, Marvell’s ‘green’ poems and his political verses, and some of the first may be contemporary with ...

Act One, Scene One

David Bromwich: Don’t Resist, Oppose, 16 February 2017

... The talents of the party know better – senators like Sherrod Brown and Sheldon Whitehouse, Elizabeth Warren and Chris Murphy – but many others appear not to realise how much they have surrendered. ‘A majority,’ Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, ‘held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily ...

The Animalcule

Nicholas Spice: Little Mr De Quincey, 18 May 2017

Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey 
by Frances Wilson.
Bloomsbury, 397 pp., £25, April 2016, 978 1 4088 3977 5
Show More
Show More
... Quincey wrote about loss, including the loss when he was six years old of his beloved older sister Elizabeth, an event which he considered the defining experience of his life, leaves us on the outside: the writing is like beautifully worked bone with no marrow. De Quincey​ ’s extensive writings about himself – the Confessions, Suspiria, the ...

The Angry Men

Jean McNicol: Harriet Harman, 14 December 2017

A Woman’s Work 
by Harriet Harman.
Allen Lane, 405 pp., £20, February 2017, 978 0 241 27494 1
Show More
The Women Who Shaped Politics 
by Sophy Ridge.
Coronet, 295 pp., £20, March 2017, 978 1 4736 3876 1
Show More
Show More
... her three sisters were born into an upper-middle-class London family: her father (whose sister, Elizabeth, became Lady Longford; Antonia Fraser is Harman’s cousin) was a doctor and her mother had qualified as a barrister, though she gave up work when she had children. Their four daughters were to be educated but marriageable; not too submissive or too ...

Fed up with Ibiza

Jenny Turner: Sybille Bedford, 1 April 2021

Sybille Bedford: An Appetite for Life 
by Selina Hastings.
Chatto, 432 pp., £35, November 2020, 978 1 78474 113 6
Show More
Show More
... cooked and ate with M.F.K. Fisher and Julia Child. And when she settled in England in the 1960s, Elizabeth David told her that the bit in her first novel about a dinner of sea urchins, ‘heaped in a great armorial pile … like the unexplained detail on the hill by the thistles and the hermitage of a quattrocento background’, followed by a plain grilled ...

Worm Interlude

Patricia Lockwood: What is a guy for?, 17 November 2022

Liberation Day 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 238 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 1 5266 2495 6
Show More
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain 
by George Saunders.
Bloomsbury, 432 pp., £10.99, April 2022, 978 1 5266 2424 6
Show More
Show More
... man! Then again, I’m of the school that thinks teachers should be weird and sort of hate you. Elizabeth Bishop comes to class, her eczema is very bad that day, she reads your poem and closes her eyes.Still, it sheds light. ‘Sparrow’, a third-person story from Liberation Day that is lovely on the first read and a little condescending on the second, now ...

A Comet that Bodes Mischief

Sophie Smith: Women in Philosophy, 25 April 2024

How to Think like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind 
by Regan Penaluna.
Grove, 296 pp., £9.99, March, 978 1 80471 002 9
Show More
The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy 
edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro.
Routledge, 638 pp., £215, June 2023, 978 1 138 21275 6
Show More
Show More
... comments to question the representativeness of her experience. They’d been taught the work of Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot in the 1980s! Could things be as bad as all that? ‘Probably not,’ someone called Brian replied.To suggest that a culture of sexism might be disproved by the presence of a few women who are granted exceptional status ...