alcoholism
Nick Lowe is that rare phenomenon — the veteran rock star who improves with age
It is to Nick Lowe’s everlasting credit that in May 1977, a few months after David Bowie released the album…
In praise of Tove Ditlevsen — the greatest Danish writer you’ve never heard of
Pick up a Penguin Classic from a cult Danish author who ‘struggled with alcohol and drug abuse’ and took her…
25 years off the booze has taught me three simple things
Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as…
Cost of Living at Hampstead Theatre isn’t a bad show – and it contains a star in the making
Hampstead has become quite a hit-factory since Ed Hall took over. His foreign policy is admirably simple. He scours New…
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Colombia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever,…
Art of darkness
Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative,…
Amsterdam Notebook
When my husband and I arrived in our adored Amsterdam on a sun-drenched schoolday afternoon — less than an hour…
Was there a cover-up over Shakespeare’s death?
How did the Bard kick the bucket? The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death reignites interest in a great literary mystery.…
More family history from Knole and Sissinghurst
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen reminds me of Nabokov
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
Hitting rock bottom in LA
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
The poetic power of Patrick Hamilton's pubs
Nice airport was more or less deserted. Two-and-a-half hours early for the easyJet flight to Gatwick, I had a leisurely…
In and out of the drink
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
From Adrian Gill to A.A. Gill — with love and thanks
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
Forgive us our Christmases as we forgive those who Christmas against us
After lunch on Christmas Day my father always stood at the sink in his apron and yellow Marigolds and did…
Eugene O’Neill: the dark genius of American theatre
George Bernard Shaw called him a ‘Yankee Shakespeare peopling his isle with Calibans’. He was dubbed ‘a fighting Tolstoy’ and…
Enjoy gin but don’t read books? Or read them only while drinking gin? This is the book for you
Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful…
Deserter, wifebeater, great poet: the shame and glory of Vernon Scannell
Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward.…
To see how good Journey's End is, just look at who it's offended
‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s…
In defence of binge drinking
Such an ugly word, ‘binge’. Why can’t we talk about ‘spree drinking’ or ‘frolic drinking’ or ‘extravaganza drinking’? But no,…
A Trip to Echo Spring, by Olivia Laing - review
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
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