abuse

From tragedy to mockery: Munichs, by David Peace, reviewed

14 September 2024 9:00 am

The devastating crash at Munich-Riem airport in 1959 haunts Manchester United fans to this day. Peace defies anyone to read his novel and use ‘Munichs’ as an insult ever again

Her weird name was the least of Moon Unit Zappa’s problems

17 August 2024 9:00 am

Frank and Gail Zappa’s eldest child describes how the endless battles between her manipulative mother and misogynist father in the 1970s blight the family to this day

Escape into fantasy: My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, reviewed

27 January 2024 9:00 am

The 14-year-old daughter of a Dutch farmer is pursued by a paedophile vet and tries hard to combat the abuse by imagining she’s a bird

A redemptive fable: Night Watch, by Jayne Anne Phillips, reviewed

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Set in the Appalachian Mountains, the novel centres around a family struggling to survive domestic abuse and abandonment in the aftermath of the American civil war

Britney Spears is back with a vengeance

2 December 2023 9:00 am

After years of abuse and being reduced to the status of child-robot, the singer is back on track with soaring album sales and a smash-hit memoir

Time to take your meds, Kanye

1 July 2023 9:00 am

No one does agonising quite like Mobeen Azhar. In several BBC documentaries now, he’s set his face to pensive, gone…

A doomed affair: Kairos, by Jenny Erpenbeck, reviewed

24 June 2023 9:00 am

A young woman and an older, married man fall passionately in love in the last days of the GDR – but abuse and jealousy soon turn things sour

All about my mother: Édouard Louis’s latest family saga

9 July 2022 9:00 am

Shunned by his father and his peers because of his homosexuality, Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992) left his village…

A gentle soap opera with nudity and book chat: Conversations with Friends reviewed

21 May 2022 9:00 am

It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set…

Abandoned for a bogus guru – Lily Dunn’s harrowing family memoir

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Sins of My Father begins with an ending. Describing her 61-year-old parent’s final desperate flight from a life of vibrant…

More penny dreadful than Dickensian: Lily, by Rose Tremain, reviewed

20 November 2021 9:00 am

Rose Tremain’s 15th novel begins with a favoured schmaltzy image of high Victoriana: it is a night (if not dark…

Is the life of Jimmy Savile a suitable subject for drama?

11 September 2021 9:00 am

Translating the story of Jimmy Savile to stage or screen is a creative minefield, says Jonathan Maitland, who knows from first-hand experience

The gender identity issue: Kathleen Stock puts her head above the parapet

15 May 2021 9:00 am

‘Something is afoot,’ wrote the academic philosopher Kathleen Stock in 2018: Beyond the academy, there’s a huge and impassioned discussion…

Meet the front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’

28 November 2020 9:00 am

Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism

Is this the last round in the great celebrity Punch and Judy show?

2 May 2020 9:00 am

It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached…

The scars of public school: English Monsters, by James Scudamore, reviewed

7 March 2020 9:00 am

‘James Scudamore is now a force in the English novel,’ says Hilary Mantel on the cover of English Monsters, which,…

The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels

17 February 2018 9:00 am

Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…

Girl, interrupted: Rooney Mara as Una

Moral maze

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who…

A film that dares to suggest that paedophile priests may be capable of holiness

26 March 2016 9:00 am

Damian Thompson admires a Chilean film about paedophile priests which, unlike Spotlight, dares to explore social and psychological complexities

Why the next Tory leader is likely to be in the ‘Leave’ camp

13 February 2016 9:00 am

Here is a thought for all those Tory MPs calculating their personal advantage in the forthcoming EU referendum: unless the…

Sorry, but the Bullingdon Club really doesn’t help your career

29 October 2015 9:00 am

I’m getting a lot of abuse on Twitter for saying that having been a member of the Bullingdon is more…

I’m utterly sickened by this story of a man trying to talk to a woman on a train

29 August 2015 9:00 am

What can we as a society do about the relentless harassment of women by terrifying men? Menacing men, threatening men,…

The serried ranks of an El Sistema youth orchestra in Caracas, 2012 — a ‘miracle’ that’s turned very sour

Sex, lies and El Sistema

6 December 2014 9:00 am

An explosive new book uncovers abuse at the heart of one of classical music’s most revered institutions. Damian Thompson investigates

Is clicking on Jennifer Lawrence’s naked pictures really as bad as hacking and distributing them?

6 September 2014 9:00 am

‘If you click on Jennifer Lawrence’s naked pictures,’ said the headline on the Guardian’s website, ‘you’re perpetuating her abuse.’ That…

Stirring the imagination into overdrive: ‘The Sinner’ by John Collier (1904)

Sex, secrets, and self-mortification: the dark side of the confessional

1 March 2014 9:00 am

I have a confession to make. I really enjoyed this book. It’s been a while since I admitted something of…