Suicide
What is the relationship between truth and accuracy? The Lifespan of a Fact reviewed
At the time, I’m sure it all seemed absolutely hilarious. It was in 2012 that W.W. Norton first published The…
An astonishing treat: Dear Evan Hansen at the Noël Coward Theatre reviewed
Dear Evan Hansen, by Steven Levenson, opens as a standard American teen-angst musical. Evan is a sweaty geek with a…
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…
Linked in
What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of…
Long life
No good deed goes unpunished. This is a saying that applies with special poignancy to Olive Cooke, the 92-year-old poppy…
Strange young things
Why are so many Conservative activists so noxious?
The Spectator’s notes
Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…
Matters of life and death
‘Bait by Cartier,’ she growls as her priceless diamond bracelet is strapped to a piece of rope and dropped overboard…
Eyes wide shut
Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’,…
Turing’s long shadow
As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…
A Stoic among sadists
They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…
Suffering in style
Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…
Suicide
There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking…
Pass the sick bag
Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking…
Sight and sound
A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting…
Not even Turing deserves a posthumous pardon
Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…
The Ancient way of death
There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the…
Terminally confused
The closer you look at the campaign for ‘assisted dying’, the less reassuring it all becomes
