Memoir
Am I a brave cult survivor, too?
When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group…
Dying for attention
In the social media age, breaking ‘the last taboo’ is de rigueur
A load of old Boltzmann
I’ve got a mathematical problem. Birth of a Theorem is by one of the great geniuses of today, a cosmopolitan,…
Serving Mammon first
The Saudis, official custodians of Islam’s holiest place, have bulldozed its historical sites, perverted its religion and turned Mecca into one vast shopping mall, says Justin Marozzi
In a world of their own
Cilla Black has become a strange creature during her 50 years in showbiz. When her husband Bobby was in hospital…
An excess of spin
Pietersen’s self-indulgent tales of woe lack credibility
All sorts and all sports
Sport isn’t about putting a ball into a net or over a bar or into a hole. It’s about the…
Keeper of the secrets
Memories of Mary Soames, Churchill’s remarkable daughter
Making hay …
This book is a portrait of one man’s meadow. Our now almost vanished meadowland, with its tapestry of wildflowers, abundant…
A dangerous heroine addiction
This book arose from an argument. Lifelong bookworm Samantha Ellis and her best friend had gone to Brontë country and…
The good companion
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
‘I shall surely sing’
A few weeks ago, I was wandering with a friend around West London when our conversation turned to the reliable…
Six of the best
When one notices the first symptoms of senile dementia (forgetting names, trying to remember the purpose of moving from one…
Breaking omertà
According to the medical historian Professor Sonu Shamdasani, Sigmund Freud was not the best, nor actually the most interesting, psychoanalyst…
Salad days
The early 1990s in Russia were hungry years. At the time, I was a student, too idle to barter and…
Cheap and cheerful
Mrs Thatcher was widely believed to have said that ‘any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on…
Not just a pretty dress
Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on…
The last hurrah
Sound the trumpets. Let rip the Byzantine chorus of clattering bells and gongs, the thunder of cannons, drums and flashing…
Last man standing
Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being…
Life in the Augean stables
What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another…
Loved and lost
Author has late-blossoming romance with authoress, both divorcees, and they live together in a cramped house in Harrogate full of…
No shrinking Violet
Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me…
A fascist’s fireside chat
This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…
The essential vade-mecum
After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel…
