My prep school scarred me for life
‘A part of me died at school’, Charles Spencer writes in his shockingly stark account of sadism and sexual abuse at Maidwell Hall, Northamptonshire, in the 1970s
Even pilgrims are staying away from Jerusalem
Israel has a new train line: 25 minutes from Ben Gurion airport to Jerusalem. The Christian pilgrims would love it…
The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first,…
The game’s up for ‘anti-racist’ racism
There are only a few rules to column-writing. One of the strictest is never to waste time bouncing off the…
You’ll want to claw your face off: Scoop reviewed
Scoop is a dramatised account of the events leading up to the BBC’s 2019 Newsnight interview with Prince Andrew. The…
Stop worrying if your child is a picky eater
One parent in our class WhatsApp chat raised a pressing concern: her daughter was coming home every day with a…
Choreographers! Enough with the reworkings of Carmen and Frankenstein!
Carmen and Frankenstein are without a doubt two of the most over-worked tropes in our culture, the myths of the…
A.A. Milne and the torturous task of writing
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month…
Dramatic, urgent and intriguing: BBC1’s This Town reviewed
After conquering the world with Peaky Blinders (and before that by co-creating Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), Steven Knight…
Am I having a heart attack?
Nairobi Some of our medical practitioners in Kenya advertise their services on street corners. ‘Bad omens, lost lovers, broken marriage,…
Dear Mary: how can I unmask anonymous marathon sponsors?
Q. My son-in-law is running the Paris marathon to raise money for cystic fibrosis research and has sent out a…
Under the Italian sun, the insects are stirring
The sun was setting on the first day of spring and I felt unusually happy as I fed the donkey.…
