autism
Alice in Nightmareland: The Matchbox Girl, by Alice Jolly, reviewed
A mute 12-year-old girl is invited to Dr Asperger’s clinic in 1930s Vienna – but how will ‘idiot’ children fare once the Nazis come to power?
Autism isn’t a ‘superpower’
A very warm welcome for Margaret Thatcher inside autism’s ever-growing tent – if she can find space to wield her…
Misfits unite: The Emperor of Gladness, by Ocean Vuong, reviewed
Vuong’s disparate characters in rural Connecticut, including a Lithuanian octogenarian and her teenage Vietnamese carer, find fulfilment not in achievements but in loving companionship
How come the only Palestinians Louis Theroux met were non-violent sweeties?
Louis Theroux: The Settlers was never likely to be a programme with much of a narrative arc – and so…
Who will care for the carers themselves?
Caroline Elton describes the problems of looking after her profoundly autistic brother, and admits to childhood feelings of fear, guilt and resentment
The nerdy obsessive who became the world’s richest man
Seen by fellow pupils as an obnoxious loner, Bill Gates was a rebellious teenager, challenging his teachers and ‘at war’ with his parents
Child of nature
Dara McAnulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland. He has autism; so do his brother, sister and mother —…
Nothing routine
Autism and lockdown are a challenging mix
Being diagnosed as autistic was the happiest day of my life
It’s easy to forget that until the late 1980s the notion of an autistic person being able to write a…
Worried about sky-high rents? Learn to love a bedsit
‘I’m not going to your place, it looks like a crack den.’ It’s not exactly a vote of confidence when…
Letters: my autism is a challenge, not an affliction
Autistic freedom Sir: Jonathan Mitchell, an autistic writer, argues that autism is an affliction and that a cure should be…
A hedge-fund protagonist – Gary Shteyngart takes aim in Lake Success
‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured…
The power of Sue MacGregor’s The Reunion
The return of Sue MacGregor’s long-running Radio 4 series The Reunion (produced by Eve Streeter) is a welcome reminder of…
For goodness’ sake
Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ…
Self’s obsessions
This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a…
The Spectator’s notes
However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax…
Hero or collaborator?
Simon Baron-Cohen wonders whether the humane Hans Asperger may finally have betrayed the vulnerable children in his care in Nazi-occupied Vienna
Gothic mysteries
This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are…
Salvation through music
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
