E ach and every place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner...
T he balconied rooftop apartment in Zamalek on the island of Gezira which my father rented when we arrived in Cairo in 1947 looked over the Nile to the east and Gezira Sporting Club to the...
At best, the incoherence can be interpreted as evidence he's a gormless, love-hungry child, a sort of feral president, as much the dupe in his own confidence scheme as he is its perpetrator.
F aced with the threatening possibility of hope, Beckett liked to get his retaliation in first. ‘Downhill begins this year,’ he announced with grim satisfaction in 1966. Even this...
A ung San Suu Kyi ’s civilian-led government is facing its most serious crisis since coming to office in March 2015. In the small hours of 9 October, as many as five hundred people,...
I n the winter of 1994, while I was living in the northern Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, I decided to flee the sub-zero dry cold that grips the region for half the year by making the...
I t is hard to imagine Clement Attlee, the most effective champion of ordinary working people in Labour’s history, thriving in Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. Not only was he a...
To read the Asquith-Venetia letters – or at least the ones available in print – is to see that Asquith was a weird kind of philanderer. The Venetia he addresses is partly a daughter, partly...
There is no lonely existential insight that will save us permanently from prejudice and platitude. But we can try thinking, and keep at it. In his later years Roland Barthes was less keen on demythologising....
R omanticism bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all...
Rick Moody remembered his first encounter with Carter at a creative writing seminar: ‘Some young guy in the back … raised his hand and, with a sort of withering scepticism, asked, “Well,...
Runciman’s social network was ever-expanding, especially in the direction of crowned heads, though he could be as ungracious about royalty as about everyone else. He received his knighthood in...
While the existence of Brooke’s correspondences with Noel Olivier and James Strachey was known – it was just that they couldn’t be read – another set of letters that no one...
H e was the greatest long-distance runner of the mid-20th century, but when he ran Emil Zátopek looked ridiculous. His face was a mask of pain and his head lolled to the side, as though...
T he 1940s was the generative decade for American dance. George Balanchine, who was inching towards the founding of the New York City Ballet in 1948, produced eight works for other companies....
A tractor was lumbering towards me, so I pulled into a passing place. It was silage-cutting time on Westray, one of the most northerly islands of Orkney. The driver waved, but I stayed...
My father splashed out on the celebrated Peal’s bespoke brogues for his newly arrived young Italian wife; she was to have the best of English classic design, sturdier by far than a glass slipper,...
W e live in the golden age of pathography. Before the middle of the 20th century there was very little writing devoted to the experience of living with illness. There were many reports of...