Prison
A top criminal lawyer’s guide to cocaine
Drug-taking is less glamorous when you know how the trade really works
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen reminds me of Nabokov
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
Do any of us know what our human rights are?
Apart from the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I’ve never known what my human rights are…
Long before Twitter, Wogan offered continuous conversation
For once, the superlatives that have greeted Terry Wogan’s death from cancer have been entirely in keeping with the man.…
Nature beats nurture nearly every time
I’ve been doing some thinking recently about the findings of behavioural geneticists and their implications for education policy. For instance,…
A gleeful vision of the future from Margaret Atwood
What could happen in literature to a young couple — or a pair of young couples — who fall off…
Elisa Segrave’s diary: A prison visit to a friend
Off to prison to visit a writer friend, first jailed led some years ago for trying to find a hit…
Here’s everything Islamophobic that I have to say, all at once
A couple of weeks back I wrote an article headed: ‘Call me insane, but I’m voting Labour.’ Among the many…
The utterly ludicrous and petty campaign against Ched Evans
A new name to help us welcome in the new year: Jean Hatchet. A name which is almost certainly too…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that inheritance tax ‘shouldn’t be paid by people who’ve worked hard and saved…
My drug-addict friend needs medical help, not a prison sentence
Gstaad ‘On ne touche pas une femme, même avec une fleur,’ says an old French dictum, one not always adhered…
Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late?
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
