My great-grandmother gave away her jewels in the street. In a different setting, this might be just a good story. But my family has always been ambivalent about money and events. Extravagant...
Coco Chanel died in her suite at the Ritz Hotel on 10 January 1971. Her funeral, held a few days later, caused a traffic jam on the rue Royale, with throngs in front of the Madeleine...
Why write an autobiographical novel? Shouldn’t fiction depart from life and show us a world that’s bigger, weirder and more dramatic than our own? ‘One risks losing...
I feel 13 again because the old questions reassert themselves. How did these people get here? What connects them? I thought I had learned something about networks, and now I realise I know rather little....
I’ve always needed to have books around me, quantities of them, ever since I can remember. There may be something pathological about it. When I was a boy, the eldest child of literate but...
When Chowang Sherpa joined us at Kathmandu airport for the flight to Lukla, he was carrying a flat-screen TV set, still in its box. The TV was on its way to Everest Base Camp....
Of Philip Larkin’s many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz...
‘We knew we had a father but apparently a father was something that wasn’t there,’ Sibylle Lacan writes.
The first moving creature Willy saw was me, and he snuggled in my hand, and when I put him in a warm cage I kept it at eye level and made sure he had plenty to eat. He doubled in size in ten days, and...
Robert Peters, né Parkins, wasn’t much to look at. He was ‘a little man with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. Photographs show him as steeply balding, with a...
In August 1970 Mary Lou Maxwell, a seamstress married to a Reverend Willie Maxwell, was found beaten and strangled to death in her Ford Fairlane on a quiet road near her home outside Alexander...
At a conference in Bangkok five years ago our Chinese delegation of about a dozen civil servants was having dinner with four American delegates from the State Department and the Environmental...
For months after I was summoned to appear for jury duty in North London, I couldn’t stop asking people – in England, in America – if they’d ever been called up too. The...
Quite a few academics in British universities are still called ‘lecturers’ even if plenty of humanities students seem to think lecturing is unnecessary. They can see the point of...
In 1821, aged 17, Aurore Dupin tried to kill herself by riding her horse into a deep river. Twenty-eight years later, Landry, a character in La Petite Fadette, a novel written by Dupin under...
A pleural effusion, fluid trapped between the linings of the lung, had been identified on the CT scan of a 65-year-old man recently diagnosed with lung cancer. ‘Either it’s...
Darwin was remarkably patient. Only once, on a letter from the Prague-born astronomer Anton Schobloch, who wanted to know ‘how is it possible, that there are hemaphrodits’ [sic] did he go so far as...
‘My military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That...