madness

The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo

8 June 2024 9:00 am

Mark Bostridge’s obsession with Victor Hugo’s beautiful daughter almost rivals her own infatuation with Albert Pinson, the naval officer she pursued around the world

There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis

Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed

24 February 2024 9:00 am

In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life

Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?

20 January 2024 9:00 am

Covid-19 proved devastating to our self-confidence and faith in others, says Daniel Freeman, who describes the ‘corrosive’ effects of mistrust on individuals and society

The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore

18 June 2022 9:00 am

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of…

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

21 May 2022 9:00 am

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…

Haunted by the past: Last Days in Cleaver Square, by Patrick McGrath, reviewed

22 May 2021 9:00 am

At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in…

Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomised

6 March 2021 9:00 am

Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to…

Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot

14 November 2020 9:00 am

Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…

Excess and incest were meat and drink to the Byrons

11 April 2020 9:00 am

Excess, incest and marital misery were in the blood. Frances Wilson uncovers several generations of infamous Byrons

Nikola Tesla — a man of pyrotechnic intelligence, comparable to Einstein, Marconi and Edison

The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla

30 June 2018 9:00 am

Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…

Val McDermid’s Diary: Facing 3,000 choices at the Edinburgh festival

29 August 2015 9:00 am

There are many good reasons for being in Edinburgh in August, when the population doubles and nobody looks twice if…

The artist who only turned into a major painter once he became a homicidal maniac

25 July 2015 9:00 am

Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…

Women go off the rails

18 April 2015 9:00 am

The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman —…

They sought paradise in a Scottish field — and found hunger, boredom and mosquitoes

14 February 2015 9:00 am

Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because…