Death
‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’: Sophie Calle interviewed
‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’ Thus Sophie Calle objected to the first line of…
Loved and lost
Richard E. Grant pulls off a feat here. The title is twee but the content isn’t. With unselfpitying dash the…
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
Happiness is a warm gun
‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of…
Last words
Facing up to the prospect of one’s own mortality is always jarring; but when you’ve spent your life trying, and…
Communing with the dead
Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in…
A death-haunted city
Naples, the tatterdemalion capital of the Italian south, is said to be awash with heroin. Chinese-run morphine refineries on its…
Low life
‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a…
Time is running out
This is not a book about tennis. Roger Federer appears early on, trailed by the obligatory question ‘When will he…
Life in the Afterworld
Angus Mooney is dead. Freshly murdered, he’s appalled to find himself in an Afterworld, having always rejected the possibility of…
The heart bleeds
‘CERTIFICATE IS NOT EVIDENCE OF IDENTITY,’ the freshly issued death certificate read. In the craziness and shock of grief for…
God’s first draft
Readers familiar with Sheila Heti’s work, most notably How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, in which she examines both…
Ill gotten gains
I have heartburn. I probably have heartburn simply because both my parents also had a lot of heartburn, and I…
To die for
If there’s any form of entertainment that I will reliably find time for, no matter how big the to-read pile…
It’s hard not to pity Ghislaine Maxwell
It’s hard not to feel a batsqueak of pity for Ghislaine Maxwell — 500 days and counting in solitary confinement.…
A dead cert
Covid or no Covid, we’re all going to snuff it
Bad blood
In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45.…
Covid deaths in context
What would have been your overall chances of dying in the first 19 weeks of 2021 compared with recent years?…
Mourning sickness
Why are we so scared of other people’s grief?
High life
Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him…
Wild life
Malindi, Kenya I’ve learned that mourning must be tackled ever so gently. As a younger man, when friends were killed…
Wild life
Indian Ocean coast ‘I love you’ became just ‘love’, and that was the last word Mum was able to say…
High life
Gstaad Lord Belhaven and Stenton, a wonderful man and the quintessential English gentleman, died at 93 just before the end…
Sex and corpses
A great temple of the goddess Tara can be found at Tarapith in West Bengal. But her true abode, in…
Wild life
Bexhill-on-Sea My Aunt Beryl taught me to love books and paintings. When I’m at a loose end in London, lonely,…
