I t happens twice a year. The beach between Tel Aviv and Jaffa fills with Palestinians from the West Bank. For many children this is the only time they get to visit the seaside, even though...
W hen the Australian cricketers Steve Smith, David Warner and Cameron Bancroft were exposed tampering with the ball during last year’s test series in South Africa there was, along with...
Anti-immigrant hatred, aggressive deterrence policies and mass deportations were happening before Trump was elected, and the xenophobia and racism he has amplified will not end if he loses in 2020.
There was someone sitting in the nearest seat. It was the queen, separated from me by a few inches and a pane of glass. We locked eyes for a vital moment: if my dead grandfather had been unwrapping a...
M y brother is not dead. So far, he has lost only the top part of the index finger of his right hand, though he may lose more. He works with chainsaws. Or rather, he used to work with...
A ‘Mary Sue’ is an implausibly skilful, attractive or successful protagonist who seems to be a stand-in for the author, especially in fanfiction. The term comes from Paula...
M y great-grandmother gave away her jewels in the street. In a different setting, this might be just a good story. But my family has always been ambivalent about money and events. Extravagant...
C oco Chanel died in her suite at the Ritz Hotel on 10 January 1971. Her funeral, held a few days later, caused a traffic jam on the rue Royale, with throngs in front of the Madeleine...
W hy write an autobiographical novel? Shouldn’t fiction depart from life and show us a world that’s bigger, weirder and more dramatic than our own? ‘One risks losing...
I feel 13 again because the old questions reassert themselves. How did these people get here? What connects them? I thought I had learned something about networks, and now I realise I know rather little....
I ’ve always needed to have books around me, quantities of them, ever since I can remember. There may be something pathological about it. When I was a boy, the eldest child of literate...
W hen Chowang Sherpa joined us at Kathmandu airport for the flight to Lukla, he was carrying a flat-screen TV set, still in its box. The TV was on its way to Everest Base Camp....
O f Philip Larkin’s many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz...
‘We knew we had a father but apparently a father was something that wasn’t there,’ Sibylle Lacan writes.
The first moving creature Willy saw was me, and he snuggled in my hand, and when I put him in a warm cage I kept it at eye level and made sure he had plenty to eat. He doubled in size in ten days, and...
R obert Peters , né Parkins, wasn’t much to look at. He was ‘a little man with a stiff back who walked like a penguin’. Photographs show him as steeply balding, with a...
A t a conference in Bangkok five years ago our Chinese delegation of about a dozen civil servants was having dinner with four American delegates from the State Department and the Environmental...
I n August 1970 Mary Lou Maxwell, a seamstress married to a Reverend Willie Maxwell, was found beaten and strangled to death in her Ford Fairlane on a quiet road near her home outside...