On the afternoon of 14 March, as the National People’s Congress was coming to an end in Beijing, men huddled to play cards in Hanzhongmen Square, Nanjing. Washing was spread over hedges to...
Angela Carter didn’t enjoy much of what she called ‘the pleasantest but most evanescent kind of fame’.
Of the two leading rivals for the London mayoralty, Ken Livingstone is much the more difficult to imagine as a child.
In May 1895, the day before Oscar Wilde’s trial began, W.B. Yeats called at Wilde’s mother’s house in London to express his solidarity and that of ‘some of our Dublin...
The Emperor Caligula offers another case of the King Canute problem.
My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory.
With every week it becomes more and more difficult to hold on to a feeling which has become so instinctive as to be almost consoling: a contemptuous suspicion of the Burmese government, and a...
In his prime, Dr Hewlett Johnson was one of the most famous men in the world. Almost from the moment he was made dean of Canterbury in 1931, he became instantly recognisable everywhere as the Red...
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?