Here’s to Bill
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
The joy of physics
How a book on relativity and quantum theory became a surprise hit
Shock and awe in Coventry, 14 November 1940
On 14 November 1940, at seven in the evening, the Luftwaffe began to bomb Coventry. The skyline turned red like…
The Grand Tour
The Grand Tour usually culminated with Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, where Vesuvius offered a visual education in…
Cats, whisky and modernity: the J.G. Ballard I knew
That cinema is having another Ballardian moment will surprise few fans. J.G. Ballard, who died of cancer in 2009 at…
Cruising
By the end of my ten-day Atlantic crossing to New York, a new wellbeing seemed to radiate from me. Lulled…
The trip of a lifetime
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became…
Salvation through music
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
Beautiful, bedevilled island
The Arabs invaded Sicily in the ninth century, leaving behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. In the Sicilian capital of Palermo,…
The dreamer
Ian Thomson on the creative limbo that spawned Fellini’s modernist masterpiece, 8½
Cross rail
Conversations with a ticket inspector on the Norwich train
A brave man takes a stand
Los Angeles ghetto life — thrashed, twisted and black — is not a world that most Americans care to visit.…
A lone Crusader declares holy war
In 2011, Anders Breivik murdered 69 teenagers in a socialist summer camp outside the Norwegian capital of Oslo, and eight…
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
Marley’s ghost
From reggae icon to Marlboro Man of marijuana
No call a man dead til you bury him
Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic…
Mother Courage
Italo Calvino, the Italian arch-fabulist, wrote a foreword to this celebrated wartime diary when it appeared in Italy in 1956.…
One detective bows out…
Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was…
We shall fight them on the beaches…
Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private…
Letter from Haiti
This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the…
Welcome to the club
Writing frankly about Jamaica has made me nervous of invitations from strangers. How would this one turn out?
A fool’s paradise
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a…
Funny, rude and tender
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album,…
Wasted in the wastelands
Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple…
Not for the squeamish
Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark…
