Life doesn’t care if your misery has a plot – but readers do
Sometimes writers have to get a memoir out of their system before they can start on their great novel. Will…
Lolita's secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite
Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of…
Lillian Hellman lied her way through life
Lillian Hellman must be a maddening subject for a biographer. The author Mary McCarthy’s remark that ‘every word she writes…
Sugata Mitra interview: ‘A reduction in resources can cause something nice to happen’
Children can teach each other, believes Sugata Mitra — if you give them the internet, a big screen and a helpful granny on Skype
From Göring to Hemingway, via Coco Chanel – the dark glamour of the Paris Ritz at war
In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen did a good job of showing how foolish it is to be obsessed by…
What nannies know
Soon after moving to London at the age of 20, Nina Stibbe wrote to her sister Vic saying, ‘Being a…
Darling Monster, edited by John Julius Norwich - review
It must have been awful for Diana and Duff Cooper to be separated from their only child during the war,…
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…
