There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517...
At three o’clock in the morning somewhere between Auxerre and Lyon on the European Bike Express bus, I dreamed that I had an exclusive interview with Lance Armstrong. Armstrong is the Texan...
I n 1963 we bought a house in Southfields, a few hundred yards from the All England Lawn Tennis Club. Every year since then we have, for a fortnight, had to elbow our way crossly through tides of...
Wagner’s operas in general, and the Ring cycle in particular, have been goading the criticising classes into print for a century and a half, with still no end in sight, but the sacrifice of...
Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to...
I n the early days of colour television you could buy a device which, it was said, would convert your black and white set. It consisted of a transparent plastic sheet, half blue and half green....
John Lloyd, currently the editor of the Financial Times Magazine, resigned as associate editor of the New Statesman in April 2003. His reasons for leaving were published in a ‘farewell...
I srael’s Independence Day fell this year on 27 April. For his homework my nine-year-old son had to interview me about my military past. Before giving out the assignment, his teacher had...
‘It’s my feeling that she looked forward to her tomorrows,’ said Marilyn’s housekeeper, the last person to see her alive. But now we may be in a position to say that...
Many years ago, I was supposed to move to Los Angeles, but every time I went there, something about the light and space made me think that life was basically meaningless and you might as well...
F rom the top window at the back of our house I look down on three gardens. To the right is a wilderness, abandoned to brambles, ground elder, bindweed and buddleia. Then our patch: some of it is...
‘The Policeman’s Daughter’, 1945. I n the summer of 1927, 23-year-old Willy Brandt underwent psychoanalysis in Vienna in an attempt to cure his tuberculosis. He had spent...
Edward Hopper languished into his forties as a commercial illustrator. He got his first break thanks to a boost from a fellow artist called Josephine Verstille Nivison, who in the fall of 1923...
The Paris-Madrid road race of 1903 was a wonderfully disgraceful affair. Three hundred cars set out, conferring death and dismemberment along the dust-choked roads south. Six of the drivers were...
It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the years the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilisation...
At 8 o’clock on the night of 30 October 1938, listeners to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air might have noticed a short announcement: the show that evening was going to be an...
“The British lad magazine is not about men at all or about the business of being a grown-up person; it’s fuelled by a childish notion of hedonism – pills, thrills and bellyaches –...
Much of the literature of the 19th century grew out of sibling relationships. Tennyson’s first publication was a family project, with contributions from three brothers. The...