‘People confuse sadness with darkness’: the complicated world of Mary Gaitskill
An interview with the American novelist Mary Gaitskill
The serious business of graphic novels
One of the running jokes about ‘serious’ graphic novels is that so many seem to consist, one way and another,…
The texture of our country is changing before our eyes
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…
Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words
Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith
How moral is it to refuse a vaccine?
Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series…
The Hay festival’s uneasy dance with the UAE
The Hay Festival, memorably described by Bill Clinton as ‘the Woodstock of the mind’, has, over the past couple of…
A cat’s-eye view of 18th-century social history
Jeoffry is, by now, one of the best-known cats in literary history. And unlike the Cheshire Cat, Mr Mistoffelees, Orlando,…
In defence of wokeness
We have been reading an awful lot about ‘wokeness’ recently. Nobody, I notice, seems to be much in favour of…
Today’s undergraduates are customers – and the customer is always right
If you’re looking for a sign of the academic times, you could do worse than consider the image, published in…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
How do you enforce anarchy?
I had an argument once, in a pub, with an anarchosyndicalist. We’d both been on the same protest march so…
Salman Rushdie: ‘The implausible has become everyday’
Salman Rushdie on writing in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen
Coronavirus has made amateur mathematicians of us all
‘What is the point of learning maths? When do you ever actually need it? How does it ever affect your…
There’s no sign of apocalypse in East Finchley – yet
I was mansplaining to my wife earlier this week about why we ought to be very, very concerned by the…
The internet is taking the joy out of quotations
The internet is taking the joy out of citations
The real Calamity Jane was distressingly unlike her legend
Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different
‘I was a tortured, obviously brilliant child’: James Ellroy interviewed
James Ellroy is occasionally quoted as saying he’s the greatest American crime novelist ever. The man sometimes called the ‘demon…
Who are today’s fictional heroes?
What’s a hero? There are probably at least two answers to that. One is that heroism is a moral quality:…
Remembering the genius of Clive James
‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian…
‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend
When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend,…
Sordid confessions of a Centrist Dad
I have a shameful secret. I’ve been watching these… videos online. Amazing what you can get in a couple of…
For political discourse to survive, we must be more honest about language
When I was an English literature undergraduate, we were all very careful to avoid what used to be called the…
Oppidans vs scholars: a guide to the social politics of Eton
Every prime minister is a sociologist. Theresa May drew a distinction between citizens of somewhere and ‘citizens of nowhere’, a…
Why croquet beats cricket
People say cricket is the quintessential English game. Those people are wrong. Cricket may have a longer pedigree, but it’s…
Common sense is the real generation gap – just ask John Cleese
As I write these words, I regret to inform you, John Cleese is on his way to being cancelled. Now…
