My immediate reaction – shit, I’ve had a stroke – was followed immediately by a second: thank God we have health insurance.
T.E. Lawrence was one of history’s winners and one of its great losers. He was a winner in terms of the mythology that surrounded his reputation both in his own day and afterwards, as...
In 1836, Benjamin Shaw looked back on a life of toil in the textile factories of the North-East. He was a skilled worker, but had lived in poverty for years, buried his wife and four of his...
The salad was on expenses, the water was sparkling and the literary agent across the table was disappointed that I wasn’t a parent, I didn’t do yoga, I wasn’t a former cult...
‘Dad … There’s something I need to tell you.’
Antoni Tàpies’s monument to Picasso was commissioned by Barcelona City Council. It sits on the edge of Parc de la Ciutadella on the busy, dusty downtown street named for Picasso....
Richard Branson is the mirror image of a Russian oligarch. This is not to say that where they are bad, he is good. If even half the things in Tom Bower’s biography are true, Branson is far from being...
Not everyone likes Geoffrey Hill. There have been tedious arguments about his ‘difficulty’, about whether that difficulty has become hermetic obscurity in his later work, about his...
In her work Willa Cather celebrated heroism; in her life she collected honorary degrees, told her publishers which typeface to use, and stayed out of politics. When Sinclair Lewis won the...
A panic suddenly overtakes me, and I wonder: how did I get here? And then the moment passes, and ordinary life closes itself around what had seemed, for a moment, a desperate lack.
The only time I stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, a few years ago, I kept thinking about Gilbert Sorrentino’s Splendide-Hôtel (1973), a slim volume of meditations, 27 in all, organised from...
It was because Bagehot’s mind ranged far beyond the counting house, because he mocked the sluggish minds of City men, that his writings were so exhilarating.
In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it...
The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands.
I return to the complete mystery of why some people are knocked flat and incapable by what seem like only the mildest of dysfunctional backgrounds, compared to others whose childhoods were devastated by...
I didn’t see much of my parents during Obama’s first term, and now that I answer their emails and visit them at Christmas, I deflect their scrutiny from my bank account (near nil), my...
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933, and has characterised his childhood as that of ‘an all-American boy’.
Charlie Parker’s sad extinction released myriad afterlives: musical colossus, modernist exemplar, contested emblem of racial politics.