San Francisco

Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn

13 July 2024 9:00 am

Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years

The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends

4 November 2023 9:00 am

In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis

The rise and fall of bohemia

2 April 2023 5:00 pm

In the Kunsthalle Praha, a smart new gallery in Prague, a Scottish professor from UCLA called Russell Ferguson is trying…

The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…

San Francisco is decaying

13 February 2022 8:00 pm

During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states screamed obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my…

Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California

1 May 2021 9:00 am

San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…

They think they’re better than you

3 December 2020 8:37 am

Nancy Pelosi’s salon visit. Bill de Blasio’s gym session. Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry soirée. Cockburn can’t even keep up with…

kamala harris san francisco california

A very San Franciscan president

21 October 2020 6:56 am

The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the…

baptist

What does Kamala Harris really believe?

17 August 2020 8:39 pm

When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself…

kamala obama

Kamala Obama?

16 August 2020 2:15 am

Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as…

san francisco

San Francisco in decay

29 July 2020 10:39 pm

District Attorney Chesa Boudin personifies everything that’s wrong with San Francisco: weak on drugs, weak on crime, weak on racist…

A love letter to San Francisco’s mean streets

28 March 2020 9:00 am

Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…

Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Credit: Rex Features

Missive from a living fossil: Little Boy, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reviewed

23 March 2019 9:00 am

In his adopted city of San Francisco, the poet, publisher and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti is venerated to levels nearing those…

Timothy Leary — apostle of acid and, according to Richard Nixon, ‘the most dangerous man in America’

A strange vibration

22 July 2017 9:00 am

Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of…

The unforeseen dangers of Uber and Airbnb

5 March 2016 9:00 am

In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be…

Dolts, Doormats and FGM: theatre to make you physically sick

30 August 2014 9:00 am

Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963.…

Sex and squalor in San Francisco

5 April 2014 9:00 am

Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…

Isabel Allende's Ripper doesn't grab you by the throat

15 February 2014 9:00 am

Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…