Paedophilia
Murder, incest and paedophilia in imperial Rome
Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars appears in a vibrant new translation by Tom Holland, the current princeps of popular Roman history
Escape into fantasy: My Heavenly Favourite, by Lucas Rijneveld, reviewed
The 14-year-old daughter of a Dutch farmer is pursued by a paedophile vet and tries hard to combat the abuse by imagining she’s a bird
Beyond the cringe
Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from…
Rough justice
At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang.…
Weirder and weirder
The only impersonation I can do is my Jimmy Savile impersonation. This is not uncommon among people of my generation:…
The chaser and the chaste
Consider the hare and the hyena. The hare, Clement of Alexandria told readers of his 2nd-century sexual self-help manual Paedagogus,…
Moi… Lolita
Until this book was published, Gabriel Matzneff was a respectable man. The French author may have written about his affairs…
What cinema is for
Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…
Speak of the devil
Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself or was he murdered — and frankly who cares? Actually, having watched the four-part Netflix…
Has Bruce Norris bitten off more than he can chew?
Bruce Norris is a firefighter among dramatists. He runs towards danger while others sprint in the other direction. His Pulitzer-winning…
It’s shocking how many Michael Jackson fans are still determined to take his side
Halfway through the first part of Channel 4’s extraordinary documentary Leaving Neverland (Thursdays), I flicked through the comments on social…
How did the same word come to describe the activities of stable lads and sexual predators?
Grooming is a horrible phenomenon of modern life when it happens to abused children. Yet a magazine such as GQ…
Wilfred Owen’s troubling obsession with young boys
This year is the centenary of the Armistice to end what Siegfried Sassoon called ‘the world’s worst wound’: the first…
Moral maze
Una is a psychological drama about a woman who was abused by a man when she was 12, and who…
Sins of the fathers
Damian Thompson admires a Chilean film about paedophile priests which, unlike Spotlight, dares to explore social and psychological complexities
Doing the wrong thing
Like The Revenant and The Big Short, Spotlight is yet another Oscar contender ‘based on true events’ — although it…
Tacitus on Edward Heath
The press and police have been condemned for the way they fall on mere rumour and plaster it across the…
Ted talk
There was a grim inevitability that the name Edward Heath would one day be trawled up in connection with allegations…
Barometer
The spirit of 1945 No one would have been more surprised at the sight of 100,000 people marching in London…
Salvation through music
Ours is the era of everybody’s autobiography. Bookshops groan with misery-lit memoirs — Never Let Me Go, Dysfunction Without Tears…
His dark materials
Will Gore talks to the playwright who has brought Jimmy Savile’s crimes to the stage
Snow White or black beauty?
God Help the Child, Toni Morrison’s 11th novel, hearkens back to two of her earliest. Like The Bluest Eye, it…
‘The truth is hard’
Roger Scruton on why we’re losing the battle for western civilisation
Audience participation
Torben Betts is much admired by his near-namesake Quentin Letts for socking it to London trendies. Letts is one of…
Sistema’s secrets
An explosive new book uncovers abuse at the heart of one of classical music’s most revered institutions. Damian Thompson investigates
