Romance
My first ever blind date
Four of us go for lunch once a month. My hippy ceramist neighbour, Geoffrey, is a foodie and one of…
The naked truth about life modelling
When I left university, I prepared for a short spell of poverty while I sent off amusing and opinionated articles…
Two years without Jeremy Clarke
Two years ago, at five to eight in the evening of Monday 22 May 2023, I ran into the department…
Pope Francis, my love rival
To be honest, I felt relief when Pope Francis died. This had nothing much to do with his regular assertion,…
The satisfaction of making wine the hard way
An investment banker leaves the rat race to restore a neglected vineyard in the Loire, where he decides to do as much as possible by hand, from pruning the vines to pressing the grapes
Is there sex after 70?
When I turned 70 in September, I had a panic attack. I was certain that my romantic life was over.…
Doctor in trouble: Time of the Child, by Niall Williams, reviewed
In the early 1960s, glimmers of change start to appear in the Irish ‘backwater’ parish of Faha. A smuggled copy…
A wish-fulfilment romance: Intermezzo, by Sally Rooney, reviewed
Rooney’s fourth novel is another case of compare and contrast, with various pairings of anxious characters struggling through their twenties and thirties in picturesque Dublin
Rather in the lurch: Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
In 1945, a dilapidated Tudor manor risks being demolished – unless an impoverished evacuee with a gift for organisation can galvanise its despairing owner
My summer of love with God’s gift
Studying in Russia in 1994, Viv Groskop falls in love with a Ukrainian rock guitarist named Bogdan Bogdanovich and accompanies him on a visit home
The awkwardness of love in middle age: You Are Here, by David Nicholls, reviewed
A man and woman, both casualties of failed marriages, are attracted to one another on a walking holiday, but are strangely overcome by shyness
Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed
Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible
Extremes of passion: What Will Survive of Us, by Howard Jacobson, reviewed
On first meeting, Sam and Lily both suffer a coup de foudre and embark on an affair involving submission and sado-masochism. But where will it lead?
The summer I dwelt in marble halls
Gill Johnson recalls the glorious months she once spent in the ‘gilded labyrinth’ of a Venetian palazzo, employed as an English tutor to an aristocratic Italian family
Escape into the wild: Run to the Western Shore, by Tim Pears, reviewed
A chieftain’s daughter flees an arranged marriage with the Roman governor of Britain, enlisting the help of slave and risking both their lives
Friendless, but not unhappy
A retired librarian reflects on a childhood runaway adventure and a devastating romantic betrayal as he begins to forge new bonds in later life
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 lonely passions of Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyan
Tom Williams describes how two women’s hopes of marrying T.S. Eliot came to nothing
Love in a cold climate: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks, reviewed
In the months before the outbreak of the first world war, Anton Heideck arrives in Vienna. Family life offered him…
The fossil-hunting is more interesting than the sex: Ammonite reviewed
Ammonite is writer-director Francis Lee’s second film after God’s Own Country, one of the best films of 2017, and possibly…
One night in the backwoods
The man I met in the moose-hunters' bar, and what happened between us
How the 'dating apocalypse' led me to vajazzle my armpits
Why I went looking for love in the armpits of strange men
Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
