The canals and rivers of Oxford aren’t working waterways anymore, but livelihoods used to depend on them. Oxford’s crest – an ox ‘fording’ three wavy lines of water –...
George Meredith couldn’t leave Mary Ellen’s story alone – in novel after novel he returned to portraits of women dissatisfied with their lumbering males, who are always one step behind...
The lingo of meritocracy and comic book heroes is always at the ready when Hunter is scoring or cooking drugs. Proximity to a crack haunt sets off his ‘spidey sense’; becoming an expert addict...
The Education of Henry Adams is less about an aristocratic intellectual’s unsuitability for a democratic world than about an apprenticeship in an absorbingly difficult but vital modern skill. Adams...
Compared to xiangsheng, which is almost two hundred years old, stand-up comedy (mistranslated in Chinese as ‘talk show’) is still a baby. When Chinese overseas students moved back home in...
Sylvia Beach said that Americans came to the Left Bank for two things they couldn’t get at home, alcohol and Ulysses, but they also came for the cafés, the galleries, the nightlife. Butch...
Many of the mother and baby home residents were able to make new lives; some feel grateful for the refuge the homes afforded them. Children adopted by loving parents have thrived. But others experienced...
Exemplary craftsman, incorrigible satyr, subversive joker, avid grievance collector, liberal humanist, good son, bad husband, bountiful benefactor, Philip Roth in his prickly contrarieties aroused an...
Voters in the North ‘chose’ the Tories, but it wasn’t a free choice, just as my leaving the North wasn’t a free choice. These are choices conditioned by circumstances, dictated...
While the British adhered to the well-established concept of the ‘two Germanies’, and tried to bring out the civilised tradition of Beethoven and Goethe while suppressing the uncivilised tradition...
Vanessa Springora feels the sexual radicalism of post-1968 France marked the world she inhabited: it remained ‘forbidden to forbid’. In a section that slides into polemic, she quotes the open...
You might start reading her for the food and the celebrity gossip, but you reread for the thrilling materiality, ‘concrete and fastidious’, as she herself once suggested, of her prose:...
The only way to persuade Robert Maxwell that a story about his latest inconsequential meeting with an East European leader shouldn’t run in the Mirror was to suggest it was too important...
I n September the Uruguayan footballer Luis Suárez turned up at the Università per Stranieri in Perugia to take an Italian test. This tough language exam, a requirement for anybody...
I would like to read a different biography of Sylvia Pankhurst, one that is less hagiographic but more humane. Surely it is possible to acknowledge this remarkable woman’s foresight, determination,...
Picture, if you can, a single person with the talents of Keats, Schubert and Seurat: an inspired poet, a prodigious composer, a revolutionary painter, a figure of unlimited promise who died, like...
Mary-Kay Wilmers taught a generation of us that the job was to have a point of view. Vagueness wasn’t a useful quality, and grand declarations are not the same as good writing. If the paper didn’t...
When I was thirteen,I left school and never went back. I don’t remember much about my last day. I don’t remember what lessons I had, or what I did when I got home. I only remember trying to...