T hree hopes or dreams have played important parts in modern progressive politics in Britain in the decades after 1945. The first is the dream of the social-democratic equivalent of the...
H ow should a biographer describe the subject’s birth? A simple way is to note the time and place, the state of the family and any complications. In Eleanor Marx: A Life (Bloomsbury,...
‘I had this foresight,’ John Updike’s mother, Linda, once told a journalist, ‘that if I married his father the results would be amazing.’ Was Updike...
Shteyngart’s memoir is a love story between him and his parents.
For several years now, a number of Walcott’s friends, family and old students have travelled across the world to wish him well on his birthday, listen to him talk, and flit from one sort of jump-up...
One of the problems of ageing is knowing when to start complaining about being old.
D epending where you look, the William Burroughs centenary has either occasioned an outpouring of variously celebratory and carping prose, or a trickle of grudging acknowledgment in outlets...
‘I t’s really a miniature novel,’ we read in the introduction to this collection of Marcel Proust’s newly discovered letters, ‘C’est un vrai petit...
C onstance Fenimore Woolson’s fiction is little read these days, and she figures primarily as a character in someone else’s story. Ever since Leon Edel’s biography of Henry...
S wift once said his favourite writer was La Rochefoucauld, ‘because I found my whole character in him.’ But what did he mean? Not, surely, that he personally resembled a Grand...
A T 8 p.m. on 10 May 1981 François Mitterrand made history. On Antenne 2 – a state-run television channel – his face was broadcast to millions of French households. It took...
‘I speak all languages but in Yiddish,’ Kafka remarks in his Diaries; and when it came to writing, he might have chosen any one of them, besides German. We now read him in...
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...
I n 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...
T he 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.’
A ntoni 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....