23 September. A minor breakthrough today when I go to my barbers, Ossie’s in Parkway, and for the first time in my life I allow Azakh the barber to trim my eyebrows.
D oris was in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard...
Spender was a clubbable committee-surfer with a hefty address book, and though his thinking was nearly always muddy and his resolve nearly always petrified, he more or less got what he wanted.
B ack in 1954, the American critic Ernest Campbell Mossner brought out a Life of David Hume that was not only a pioneering work of scholarship but also a labour of love. Mossner wanted to...
P oachers – the traditional sort – come near the top of the national hierarchy of thieves. They’re up there with Raffles and Robin Hood. People who don’t own large...
T here is a striking photograph of Ambassador Maisky, elegantly dressed in a three-piece suit, balding on top as distinguished diplomats often are, standing in front of a life-size portrait of...
In 1986 Margaret Thatcher arrived at her party's annual conference in Bournemouth with a spring in her step.
Y ou 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...
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.
I f 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...
O n 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.
T he newspaper Action française habitually referred to Léon Blum, France’s Socialist leader, as the ‘warlike Hebrew’ and the ‘circumcised Narbonnais’...
E dward 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...
W hen 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...
T he 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...
W hat 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...