When I was in Harare recently I inquired about an old naturalist I’d known there. He knew he had cancer, had told his friends he’d finished his book, was all through and would like to...
The art of throwing a sickie doesn’t get the recognition (or the funding) it deserves. Even the straitlaced and well-attending would admit that it takes panache to get away with it on a...
Jacques Chirac’s museum on the quai Branly, opened last summer, continues to pull large crowds at weekends. Chirac, a long-time admirer of what used to be called ‘primitive’...
Perhaps ‘medical anthropology’ has not yet become a household term. Although anthropologists still go to Papua New Guinea, Mayotte, or the headwaters of the Amazon, many now work...
Like any self-respecting modern man I buy Ecover instead of Fairy Liquid. I recycle, I worry about my carbon footprint (must cut down on those Ryanair mini-breaks) and I’m about to buy my...
If the authors of this book sound like a firm of estate agents, it’s because they have virtuously repressed their first names as a protest against gender stereotyping. But one wonders if...
The ruins of Shanghai come as a surprise in a city so defiantly modern. Demolished low-rise houses lie in downtown streets next to luxury condominiums with names such as ‘Rich Gate’,...
The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy,...
Autumn looms darkly and terrible in my life. From midsummer I start to worry, and by late August I am filled with dread. My arachnophobia has ensured that the autumnal mating urge which causes...
‘Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful...
It is canonical in the American classroom, on television and in popular culture to celebrate the black civil rights movement as the triumph of American universalism, the vindication of the...
‘All that is left of a person is their name,’ Olivia Mostacilla told me during my month in Colombia, the first time I’d been back in two years. She wasn’t referring to the...
In 1968 my next-door neighbour in our ward at the Maudsley Hospital for the psychologically bewildered or the just plain cross was a woman from Wales in her early twenties who had slowly been...
I remember only one occasion when I wished my father dead: in early December 1983. He was 73 and it was less than a year before he died of cancer, a little more than a year after he learned that...
In February 1823, readers of the Times were treated to a detailed account of the goings-on in the home of the third Earl of Portsmouth and his wife of ten years, Mary Anne Hanson. She had for...
I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the affects on the people in turn change the classifications. We think of many kinds of...
What’s all this fuss about cooks and chefs? The how-to-cook sections of bookshops are as big as the how-to-be-successful-in-life sections; it’s no longer clear where one ends and the...
Like Suketu Mehta, I was born in Calcutta, a city ‘in extremis’, in Mehta’s words, and, like him, grew up in Bombay. His father, who worked in the diamond trade, and mine, then...