As he faced his 30th birthday he addressed the Cambridge Union in hair-raisingly ingenuous terms: ‘My great problem in life is that I do not really know what my role in life is.’ None of the journalists...
Among the candles and the flowers and the handwritten messages was a brand new edition of the collected poems of Federico García Lorca. Lorca, who came to Barcelona first in 1925, said that the Ramblas...
The event was ‘foreseeable and scandalous’, a wonderful combination in its way, and we might apply the phrase to many incidents in our world. I didn’t find it in...
We were an inseparable couple, my mother and I. Our address was: The White House, Hempton Green, nr Fakenham, Norfolk. Here we stove in the shells of our breakfast eggs with teaspoons to...
In the course of a year beginning in late 2013, I found myself at five separate places called the Meeting of the Waters. The first was the confluence of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby...
In 1975, as Henry Kissinger was trying to negotiate a settlement to the Arab-Israeli War, he warned the Israeli government that a breakdown in the talks would bring catastrophe to the Middle...
The story of Gef is both brilliantly silly and irreducibly mysterious. After seven years of research into the legend of the talking mongoose, Josiffe, a librarian at Senate House, is still not entirely...
Jane Jacobs‘s argument was as much about ideology as practice: Radiant Garden City Beautiful had seduced architects and urban planners away from what the city really was, the ways in which its built...
At first sight, a new life of Ellen Wilkinson appears to offer readers a return to ‘old Labour’ principles, as articulated and put into practice by one of the party’s most...
For all its dirty jokes and baby talk, Priestdaddy is an angry book, and Patricia Lockwood’s use of childhood idiom is a way of exposing the irrationality of institutional authority.
Jean Cocteau had a genius for being seen. As an elegant young man, with the cult poet Anna de Noailles on his arm, thanks to an introduction from Proust, he danced the polka at the Bastille...
I knew very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the...
Chávez came to adopt all the attributes political scientists associate with authoritarianism. In this sense, he could be placed squarely within Latin America’s long populist tradition. What made him...
She might have been happy enough had not her ‘beautiful warm face’ caught the eye of Augustus John. Then she knew what it was to have a grand passion and to be on the horns of a dilemma.
Although the events described here occurred only about three months ago, the man’s name escapes me. I’m not at all certain my memory is correct, and of course no one will confirm my recollections....
For Italians, I’ve found after 33 years in Italy, to belong to a family, a group of friends, a city, a region, a corporation or trade union, a church, a political party, is generally...
‘Marxism is still very young, almost in its infancy,’ Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in 1957, more than seventy years after Karl Marx’s death. Sartre had first read Marx three...
The secret policeman who met me off the plane was charming, black and experienced. His declared name was Carlos. ‘We are so glad that you are giving your son to the Revolution, Dr...