Let us call her Ruby, because she had a name like that: old-fashioned, staid, anomalous. ‘I am known everywhere as sparrer,’ she said. We had sparrows enough and to spare in those...
It’s curious in so many ways, watching the consumer bubble as it shrivels. People don’t stop wanting to buy stuff just because they are frightened. There are so many ways that fear...
It has been my habit, since I was very young, to keep easy sentiment, nostalgia, optimism even, in a secure box, and to forget where I left the key. This isn’t a confession, as it might...
Ground motions from the earthquake in Abruzzo, more than 100 kilometres away, woke my neighbours in their beds, though I managed to snore my way through it all. I live in a flat on the top floor...
The stretch of water known as San Francisco Bay was transformed in the 1930s. No one intended this, but the bay, famous for rapid shifts in weather, light and mood, became a kind of stage set for...
It isn’t simply that rules are made to be broken: the rules tell you that there is something to break. If there was no law it would be impossible to transgress. The rules, whatever else they are, are...
On the last Sunday before Christmas, I drove to Blackpool to play poker. You wouldn’t have got me there for any other reason. When I was young, my family used to take day trips to...
In those days, the doorbell didn’t ring often, and if it did I would draw back into the body of the house. Only at a persistent ring would I creep over the carpets, as if there were someone...
Last month, Ian McEwan announced that we have eight years left to save the planet from global warming. The timeframe seems to be based less on the scientific evidence than on the audacious hope...
‘When Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah,’ Peter wrote in his Second Epistle, ‘he was oppressed and tormented day after day by their lawless deeds.’ Having grown up in...
‘We are certainly living in strange times’ is how Elisabeth Roudinesco’s Philosophy in Turbulent Times begins. Roudinesco’s reader, too, is in for a turbulent and strange...
Anyone who has read the inside pages of Indian newspapers over the past few decades will be familiar with the recurring stories of violent urban crime. Some concern ‘crimes of...
If Barry Cunliffe’s large and magnificent new book has a guiding motto, it is a famous sentence by Fernand Braudel about the Mediterranean, which Cunliffe applies to the whole continent and...
My grandmother lives in sheltered accommodation in the London borough of Lambeth. In the late 1940s she and my grandfather, newly wed, migrated to London from Sligo, a small county town on...
My friend Robbie’s always had a bit of a thing about guns. In a country like South Africa this is difficult to avoid. A murder rate of roughly four hundred a week and a rape every 26...
‘The greatest single truth to declare itself in the wake of 1989,’ J.G.A. Pocock wrote two years afterwards, is that the frontiers of ‘Europe’ towards the east are...
Conjuring up the ghost of his dead friend Enkidu, Gilgamesh asks what things are like in the afterlife. Enkidu tells him it might be better that these truths remain hidden, but he agrees to...
Looking through the photographs I took in Tewkesbury in May, I found two pictures of Chuck Pavey and his floodwater hand. There’s Pavey, a 66-year-old retired electrician in a Manchester...