In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party's annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step.
You don’t need the detective powers of George Smiley, or a conspiratorial mindset, to divine that something odd is going on behind the scenes of Adam Sisman’s new biography of John...
Marianne Moore was born in her mother's childhood bedroom; grown up, she lived with her mother – most often shared her bed – until her mother died.
If it were a race, the first man home – except for Iain Banks who won the trophy by a mile – would be Oliver Sacks (announced 19 February – died 30 August), with Henning...
On 2 October 1937, a short but enthusiastic review of a newly published novel called The Hobbit appeared in the Times Literary Supplement. The Hobbit was, the anonymous reviewer said,...
More migrants die from thirst and injury in Brooks County than anywhere else in the United States.
The newspaper Action française habitually referred to Léon Blum, France’s Socialist leader, as the ‘warlike Hebrew’ and the ‘circumcised Narbonnais’...
Edward Thomas believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the...
When I began taking cocaine in the late 1970s a gram cost between £60 and £80. The sixty-quid stuff was flogged by patchouli-smelling proto-goths in black Lycra who wormed about in...
Alma Mahler Werfel celebrated her 70th birthday at home in Beverly Hills on the last day of August 1949. A brass band played as guests chose from a Mitteleuropean selection of drinks: champagne, black...
The photographer Vivian Maier worked for me for three years in the early 1980s, though no one knew she was a photographer then. She was in her late fifties, I was in my late thirties. I had a...
What do the fish call Muhammad? One of his earliest disciples said that different creatures called him by different names. He was known as Abd al-Quddus under the sea and Abd al-Ghaffar among...
Most writers she knows, Maggie Nelson writes, ‘nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they...
Migration is the topic of almost every conversation in the cafés of Baghdad and Damascus, along with the pros and cons of social aid given to migrants in different countries.
Descriptions of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His...
Almost every day since I began writing these pieces I get a letter or an email from someone who has read or remembered and liked my work.
I was the head of the Piers Gaveston Society, which is the society that David Cameron allegedly stuck his dick in a pig for. I never did that. According to Lord Ashcroft’s...
A friend who teaches in New York told me that the historian Peter Lake told him that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John...