Romance

My first ever blind date

21 June 2025 9:00 am

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

31 May 2025 9:00 am

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

24 May 2025 9:00 am

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

17 May 2025 9:00 am

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

3 May 2025 9:00 am

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?

19 April 2025 9:00 am

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

26 October 2024 9:00 am

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

28 September 2024 9:00 am

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

31 August 2024 9:00 am

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

1 June 2024 9:00 am

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

27 April 2024 9:00 am

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

24 February 2024 9:00 am

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

10 February 2024 9:00 am

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

20 January 2024 9:00 am

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

28 October 2023 9:00 am

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

15 July 2023 9:00 am

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

20 May 2023 9:00 am

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

8 October 2022 9:00 am

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

6 November 2021 9:00 am

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

27 March 2021 9:00 am

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

4 June 2016 9:00 am

The man I met in the moose-hunters' bar, and what happened between us

How the 'dating apocalypse' led me to vajazzle my armpits

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Why I went looking for love in the armpits of strange men

Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker

12 March 2016 9:00 am

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

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…