The sudden death of Roy Jenkins took us all by surprise. He was over eighty, of course, and with a heart problem that had required major surgery. This latterly gave him a good excuse to sit down...
Winning is very important to Christopher Hitchens. Dr Johnson was said to ‘talk for victory’, and by all accounts it seems the same might be said of Hitchens. He certainly writes for...
On my first night in Lebanon, there are fireworks and a ruckus. A local by-election has just been held in a Christian area of Beirut. The two candidates were the sister and the uncle of the...
For René Descartes, the problem of keeping body and soul together took three forms. First, how did thinking stuff keep company with material stuff? Soul was active, unextended in space and...
By the time I was twenty I was living in a slum house in Sheffield. I had a husband and no money; those things I could explain. I had a pain which I could not explain; it seemed to wander about my...
4 January. A Christmas letter from Cami Elbow, wife of Peter Elbow, an American college friend who teaches English at Amherst: Life in Amherst is very placid. Even grammatically correct. In...
English whimsy had a good run for its money in the 1960s. Pop culture hoovered it up and began to mass-produce it in a variety of forms. It’s odd now to remember how it looked on the...
I woke up a little bit jealous of Wendy. She told me yesterday that a baby lemur had jumped right into her lap. It was Triangle’s baby, a precocious extrovert. Triangle, named for her...
If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all...
‘On Good Friday 1984 I found myself laying a wreath at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad. This was to me extraordinary. I belong to the Church of England and have no wish to...
You come to this place, mid-life. You don’t know how you got here, but suddenly you’re staring fifty in the face. When you turn and look back down the years, you glimpse the ghosts of other lives you...
Malcolm Hayes tells us that the letters he has selected are merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist,...
At first glance, Paula Fox’s return from the dustbin of publishing history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated...
In 1921, a boat carrying Somerset Maugham upriver in Borneo capsized in eight-foot waves, and for half an hour the writer clung desperately to the wreckage. ‘At last, helped by some of the...
Karel Reisz must have been a border-crosser all his life. He was born in 1926, in the Czech mill town of Ostrava, an afternoon’s walk from the Polish border. At the age of 12, he was forced...
In December I was asked a bizarre question – what was I doing during Christmas. I was hoping the corner shop would remain open on Christmas Day for me to come to work. I took a long walk across North...
Samuel Pepys was the son of a London tailor and a president of the Royal Society. He was a philanderer who could feed a wench lobster before having his way with her under a chair in a tavern...
The memoirs of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, are among the more remarkable documents of the 18th century. Begun by 1704, they were written, rewritten and ghostwritten over three...