New York
‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending’: Sir Frank Bowling interviewed
‘I’m full of excitement waiting for this to dry out,’ Sir Frank Bowling exclaims. We are sitting in his studio,…
The sexual escapades of Edmund White sound like an improbably sordid Carry On film
The octogenarian writer seems unable to resist the burlesque, describing the most lurid encounters at an apparently droll remove
The strange potency of cheap perfume
Adelle Stripe has constructed a memoir around 18 key fragrances, but it is the Body Shop’s cheery Dewberry that evokes her worst teenage experience
The next best thing to visiting a really clever friend in New York
Vivian Gornick’s memoir of life in the city in the 1960s and 1970s is rich in anecdote and dialogues with waspish friends and neighbours
The golden days of Greenwich Village
David Browne celebrates the vitality of the Village in its 1960s heyday, when clubs were subterranean crucibles where jazz, folk, blues and poetry swirled in a potent brew
The stark, frugal world of Piet Mondrian
In September 1940 the Dutch abstract artist Piet Mondrian arrived in New York, a refugee from war and the London…
And still the colonial memoirs keep coming…
Peter Godwin’s third volume to date – of a family in various stages of decline after leaving their African homeland – is redeemed by its vivid evocations and erudition
Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze
Instantly recognisable with her cascades of necklaces and startling colours (‘pastels make me nervous’), the interior decorator would achieve real fame with a Met exhibition in 2005
Absinthe and the casual fling: Ex-Wife, by Ursula Parrott, reviewed
A sensational bestseller, first published anonymously in 1929, centres around the adventures of a bright young American divorcée, seizing love wherever she can
The truth about Paul Hollywood
My husband and I are in New York, where everyone is talking about the approaching Trump-Biden debate. Well, I’ll be…
Home to mother: Long Island, by Colm Toibín, reviewed
The sequel to Brooklyn sees Eilis leave New York shocked and angry, and return to Enniscorthy – where everything is outwardly calmer, but much has changed
How to bottle Britishness
The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks – designed to impede imports needed for the continuing…
‘Now I have been made whole’: Lucy Sante’s experience of transition
Until the age of 66, Sante lived as a deeply divided man. In this story of self-realisation, she describes how transitioning finally ‘lifted the veil’ over her existence
The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first,…
A multicultural microcosm: Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Lethem returns to the borough with a tale of violence, neglect and demographic change over the decades, tinged with nostalgia but far from sentimental
New York has cancelled Mozart
Gstaad This is the best news since the Bush-Blair duo saved us from the nuclear holocaust Saddam was about to…
The problem with the Bibby Stockholm barge
For British taxpayers perturbed by their £6 million daily bill for housing asylum seekers in hotels, New York City mayor…
Terrorists you might know or love: Brotherless Night, by V.V. Ganeshananthan, reviewed
When a Sri Lankan medical student finds her brothers joining the Tamil Tigers, she is caught in a tangle of commitments to family, friends, homeland and vocation
Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows
Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted
The root of the problem
The novelist and filmmaker Xiaolu Guo is attracted by the freedom a New York job promises, but misses the young daughter she has left behind in London
The lessons of New York’s carnage
New York I am seriously thinking of visiting a shrink (just kidding) as I now have definite proof that I…
A character assassination of Rudy Giuliani
Lord help me I love a hatchet job, and you’ll have to too if you want to make it through…
Welcome to post-truth America
A couple more weeks in the Bagel and then on to dear old London. I’ve had a very good time…
The day Elizabeth Taylor kidnapped my daughter
New York Back in the good old days the Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the hotel for…
The problem with trying to resuscitate dying languages
Samantha Ellis 9 March 2024 9:00 am
Ross Perlin is determined to support the ‘last speakers’ of endangered tongues, such as Seke. But if these speakers really are the last, they are not, in any real sense, speaking