The best children’s authors of 2015 — after David Walliams
The easy way round buying books for children at Christmas is just to get them the latest David Walliams and…
Who isn’t genderfluid?
Sex has always been less binary than it looks – but we’ve never been this boring about it
Children’s summer reading
It’s the 150th anniversary of Alice in Wonderland — cue an explosion of editions of the book, a new biography…
Degrees of bureaucracy
At Oxford and elsewhere, university administration is out of control
No man is an island
Bit of Kant, bit of Kierkegaard, bit of motorcycle maintenance. That’s one take on The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew…
Putting away the fear of childishness
Go to any bookshop — always supposing you’re fortunate enough to have any left in your neck of the woods…
Love them or leave them
My father was handed over a shop counter when he was a day old. His aunt had tried to pass…
Grimmer — and no better
Child murder, domestic slavery, abusive families, cannibalism and intergenerational hatred — what could be better for the festive fireside than…
Children’s books for Christmas
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me…
The cult of mindfulness
Separating meditation from faith might not be as harmless as it seems
She knows she is right
Shami Chakrabarti, director of the civil rights group Liberty and omnipresent media personality, is on the cover of her book.…
They had a dream
One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past,…
Drama in the mouth
It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of…
Churchgoing is good for you
And that’s true whether or not you believe in God
A baking June
If I were the kind of person who invited people to come and have a bite to eat that very…
A choice of children’s books
A children’s author and illustrator, Jonathan Emmet, created a stir recently by saying that women are effectively gatekeepers of children’s…
Women against the vote
The suffragettes’ opponents deserve to be remembered sympathetically
Paris
No city really multitasks like Paris, shorthand for romance, culture, fashion, gastronomy and the kind of street life you find…
From post office girl to woman of letters
Melanie McDonagh on Flora Thompson, whose revealing account of rural Oxfordshire life at the turn of the 19th century became a literary classic
Forgive me, Father
What Catholics really talk about in the confession box
All the president’s women
Hollande’s affair demonstrates that the French are becoming more puritanical about monogamy
Eat, drink and be merry…
... for tomorrow traditional seasonal rituals may just be ghostly memories of a vanished world, says Melanie McDonagh
A choice of children’s books
Animal stories for children are always tricky; as J.R.R. Tolkien observed in his essay on fairy stories, you can end…
The man who broke the silence
How Professor Paul Collier has bypassed the liberal taboo on discussing immigration
Not endearing, just wince-making
To understand quite how disgruntled the reviews of the latest Bridget Jones diaries have been, you have to recall quite…
