In 1659, during the last months of the Commonwealth, 72 slaves from Barbados managed to escape to London. They complained to Parliament that they had been living in ‘unsupportable...
One event dominated Tennessee Williams’s life: his sister Rose’s bilateral prefrontal lobotomy, performed on 13 January 1943, two years before The Glass Menagerie, the play he forged...
We know little for sure about Shakespeare’s wife and what she was like, and even less about their marriage, other than that Ann Hathaway gave birth to three children: Susanna in 1583 and...
Modern lives look prim beside the turbulent existence of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Distractions and misfortunes proliferated throughout his career: shipwreck (he was in his own boat,...
Sex seems to have been momentarily eclipsed as a topic for French literature, giving way to something sexier: trauma. Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq, two authors who until now have shared...
‘He was always around the corner and out of sight,’ Henry James wrote of his older brother William as a child. ‘He was clear out before I got well in.’ The philosopher...
What are poets good for? Are all attempts to speak of ‘the function of poetry’, with that reductive definite article, doomed to pompous failure? In response to these questions, the...
Like Dead Elvis and Dead Marilyn, Dead Orson is very much with us. He lives on, not only in the restored ‘director’s cuts’ of his re-released movies, the posthumously completed...
In listing Rupert Everett’s offences against decency, decorum and respect for his betters, it is hard to know where to start.
Off to a great start at lunch in Phoenix airport: Terrorist Threat Level Orange for ‘high’ as usual, women’s restrooms jammed, and then the waiter in Aunt Chilada’s Cantina...
Hillary Clinton is manifestly a beneficiary and exemplar of a massive, historically recent and still ongoing transformation. ‘I represented a fundamental change in the way women functioned...
And now for the other princess: the one who failed to stop all the clocks in Kensington Palace and Mustique, and grew old.1 In doing so she became sick, fat, grumpy, drunk and unloved. This, you...
There is a structural flaw in British politics. In theory, we have a representative democracy: we the electors vote for members of Parliament, whose job is to represent us, and who, collectively,...
‘They are burning memory. They’ve been doing it for a long time . . . I go out of my mind when I think that every night thousands of people throw their diaries into the...
I had supper with a friend on 31 August 1997. He arrived looking wonderstruck. ‘Are we just going to have dinner?’ he said. ‘Why, you think we should sit shiva?’...
Towards the end of this, his third volume of memoirs, which covers the period from independence in 1960 to the death of General Sani Abacha in 1998, the 64-year-old Wole Soyinka is preparing to...
The confessional mode in literature has an uncomplicated appeal for both writers and readers: the unburdening of guilt, vicarious or otherwise. But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir...
Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in 1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest...