Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding. Of what, then, is she the decoy?
There’s a fascinating anthropological study to be written about Oxford undergraduates of the 1960s – or perhaps this book is it. Roger Garfitt in his daffodil-yellow pinstripe suit...
The cliché is to call Bowie a chameleon, but he was more like the very hungry caterpillar, munching his way through every musical influence he came across.
A bearded patriarch, possibly in Elizabethan dress, rests on his elbow, stretched out on a snug little hillock in the middle of a wedge-shaped field of corn. He is leaning against some sort of...
The life of Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’.
On the cover of Aftermath, Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, there’s a drawing of a jigsaw. It’s the classic pattern, the one in which all the pieces – reaching out on two...
As charm is to Cary Grant, awkwardness to Jerry Lewis, vulnerability to Montgomery Clift, so malevolence is to Dennis Hopper. Very few actors specialised as Hopper did in convincing malice....
Jean-Bertrand Aristide studies the effects of music on the brain with an electroencephalogram machine.
The longest years of Joseph Heller’s writing life fell between his first book and his second. He set no records but the delay eventually got his name into magazine pieces about one-book...
What is the difference between great art and tat?
In 2005 Binyavanga Wainaina wrote a blisteringly satirical essay on ‘How to Write about Africa’ in response to Granta’s Africa issue.
Quite early one May morning, in the last days of a subarctic winter, I strayed from a marked trail I had been walking for just under two hours and discovered I was lost in the north Norwegian...
On Saturday, July 30, Dr Johnson and I took a sculler at the Temple-stairs, and set out for Greenwich. I asked him if he really thought a knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages an essential...
In this podcast, Tariq Ali reads extracts from his Diary about North Korea. The full article is below. Forty-two years ago, I was mysteriously invited to visit North Korea. Pakistan’s...
I was friendly with Jeanette Winterson in the 1980s – we even went away for a weekend together. I went slightly cool on the friendship, though she didn’t exactly do anything wrong. We...
In Frederick Forsyth’s The Dogs of War, Sir James Manson hires a mercenary called ‘Cat’ Shannon to stage a coup in the tiny West African state of Zangaro – Equatorial...
A week before Christmas, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal and already serving life for three murders, was given another life sentence at the Palais de Justice...
6 January. The alterations we have been having done are now pretty much finished, thanks to Max, a young Latvian who’s unsmiling but an excellent carpenter and Eugene, much jollier and...