Memoir
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…
