Love
‘I’m tired of your ridiculous lies’ – the wrath of Muriel Spark
The novelist’s main targets were her hapless editors at Macmillan and her former lover Derek Stanford – recipients of many vituperative early letters
The art of the anti-love song
Tracey Thorn released an album in 2010 titled Love and Its Opposite. When it comes to songwriting, it’s the ‘opposite’…
My father was the best of England
I always think of my father at this time of year. In particular, I go back to the summer of…
The diary of a dying man: Graham Caveney’s poignant cancer memoir
With months to live, Caveney looks back on his childhood, muses on favourite writers, decries NHS underfunding and rejoices in his beloved partner, Emma
Why am I so unlucky in love?
One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the…
Lovely slice of Cosmic Scouse: Michael Head & the Red Elastic, at EartH, reviewed
One of the more bizarre but recurring tales about how the music of Liverpool has been shaped over these past…
My lonely heart
Was a Guardian Blind Date the answer?
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…
Labours of love
An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall…
One day in Dublin
Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.…
Life, love and alienation
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
Love and loneliness prevail in the latest short stories
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction,…
For Julian Barnes, the only story is a love story — and it’s inevitably sad
The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century…
High life
Gstaad Last week I dreamt of a girl I met in the summer of 1953, in Greece. I had never…
Low life
A fruity voice on the train’s announcement system said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you have all your belongings, family…
Low life
What a beautiful day, I thought, as I nodded to the porter in the bowler hat and stepped out of…
Love letters for the world
Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher
