Suicide
An important story but not for the faint-hearted: Deadliest Day podcast reviewed
One of the advantages that podcasts have over the scheduled array of programmes is the space that can be given…
No escape from grief: Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li, reviewed
When Yiyun Li first became a writer, she decided that she would leave behind her native language, Chinese, and never…
Death of a rock star: Slow Motion Ghosts, by Jeff Noon, reviewed
Here is a novel set in the no man’s land between past and present, a fertile and constantly shifting territory…
Jane Haynes: the shrink who loves to break the rules
‘I have fallen in love many times in my consulting room,’ writes the psychotherapist Jane Haynes. ‘I do not mean…
Ideation, from suicide to management speak
‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked…
Who is Sylvia – what is she?
In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…
The man who disappeared
Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…
At death’s door
It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in Covent Garden and we are all learning how to kill ourselves. The venue…
Why the World Service is worth every penny
What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of…
Why it's better to give money to a beggar than to a charity
No good deed goes unpunished. This is a saying that applies with special poignancy to Olive Cooke, the 92-year-old poppy…
Conservative youth politics is noxious, but pitiful
Whenever the curtain is pulled back on youthful political activism, the picture is ugly. Three years ago, in Young, Bright…
Charles Moore’s Notes: cheap trickery in the Economist’s assisted dying campaign
Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…
If the government have their way, will Radio 4’s dramas be broken up by ads for dentures?
‘Bait by Cartier,’ she growls as her priceless diamond bracelet is strapped to a piece of rope and dropped overboard…
Masterly and heartbreaking: Amy reviewed
Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’,…
Turing, Snow White and the poisoned apple
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
‘Another terrible thing...’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
Should ‘suicide’ mean pig-killing?
There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking…
Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick
Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking…
Radio 4 deserts the British bird. Shame on them!
A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting…
Why I’m against posthumous pardons, even for Alan Turing
Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…
Assisted dying? Ancient religion was all for it
There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the…
The terminal confusion of Dignity in Dying
If you were around in the days when the US series M*A*S*H was a regular feature on British television, its…
William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher
William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…
Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper - review
This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…
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