alcoholism
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…
Death and the Bard
How did Shakespeare kick the bucket? Lloyd Evans considers the evidence
Mouldering hats and wedding veils
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
Disgusted of X-ville
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
A sex vampire on wheels
The title of this book tells you a lot. Jack Sutherland, who grew up in London and Los Angeles, worked…
Low life
Nice airport was more or less deserted. Two-and-a-half hours early for the easyJet flight to Gatwick, I had a leisurely…
Drying out in the Orkneys
‘If I were to go mad,’ Amy Liptrot writes in her memoir of alcoholism and the Orkneys, ‘It would come…
Here’s to Bill
Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at…
Addicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
Low life
After lunch on Christmas Day my father always stood at the sink in his apron and yellow Marigolds and did…
Bitter, dark and beautiful
Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century
From dram shop to Queen Mother’s handbag
Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful…
Powerful punch lines
Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward.…
Dutch courage in the trenches
‘You have no idea,’ wrote the publisher Ralph Hodder-Williams in 1929 to one of his authors, what terrible offence Journey’s…
Binge benefits
The occasional alcoholic blowout is much to be preferred to steady, everyday drinking
The muse in the bottle
The boozer’s life is one of low self-esteem and squalid self-denial. It was memorably evoked by Charles Jackson in his…
