Homosexuality
A Blanche Dubois of a book
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
Translating Proust wasn’t all
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Not even Turing deserves a posthumous pardon
Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…
No laughing matter
Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
A champion of liberal reform
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
Old school ties
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country
A later beginner
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
New York notebook
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
A place of rough justice
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
Putin’s poison
Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the…
Putin’s pink peril
Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority
Diary
Next time I’m in a sauna I’m going to say: ‘It’s like a school sports hall on prize day in…
