Childhood

Robyn Davidson explores yet another foreign country – the past

14 October 2023 9:00 am

Now in her seventies, the travel writer returns to her childhood in Australia, and the trauma of losing her mother at the age of 11

Remember, remember

7 October 2023 9:00 am

The world that blossoms in this haunting novel about the importance of memory is in the aesthetic vein known as ‘mono no aware’, or ‘the pathos of things’

Rising star

30 September 2023 9:00 am

The second volume of Knausgaard’s trilogy serves as a prequel to the first, tracing the origins of Norway’s ominous new celestial body

This is what cinema is for: Netflix’s Cuties reviewed

19 September 2020 9:00 am

Cuties is the subject of a moral panic and a hashtag #CancelNetflix. It tells the story of Amy (Fathia Youssouf),…

Why are children so fearful about the future?

8 December 2018 9:00 am

For any bosses from the Singapore education department reading this, I have a message. It comes from (I’d guess) most…

Let’s go fly a kite...

The highs – and lows – of learning to fly a kite

25 August 2018 9:00 am

I’ve flown only three kites in my life. My stepfather bought me the first. I remember seeing him from a…

Photograph of an almshouse waif by Lewis W. Hine, entitled ‘Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburg Institution’ (1909) [Bridgeman Art Library]

‘I am not a number’: the callous treatment of orphans

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. They…

Vignettes of a bygone English childhood

4 August 2018 9:00 am

Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan…

The Florida Project never sanctifies or demonises and is absorbing throughout

11 November 2017 9:00 am

The Florida Project is a drama set in one of those cheap American motels occupied by poor people who would…

David Jones, aged 12, with his chemistry set and, right, as ‘potty prof’ Daedalus

Frater, ave atque vale

19 August 2017 9:00 am

As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’…

The London prep school circuit is a horrible racket

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Prep schools are a soul-sapping waste of money

Why I’d like to be a more dangerous dad

26 March 2016 9:00 am

According to figures obtained by BBC Breakfast last week, more than 500 people were arrested in England and Wales in…

What Aristotle would have made of Cambridge’s Lego-sponsored professor

20 June 2015 9:00 am

So Cambridge University has accepted £4 million from the makers of Lego (snort) to fund a Lego chair (Argos sells…

American teenagers in the 1940s: part of the Silent Generation — so called for conforming to the norm and focusing on careers rather than activism

Older, more angsty...and maybe wiser: the new face of growing up

2 May 2015 9:00 am

We live in an age of generational turmoil. Baby-boom parents are accused of clinging on to jobs and houses which…

Meet the Skype Dads: a new sorrow of divorce in the internet age

11 April 2015 9:00 am

What happens when a divorce court accepts video calls as a substitute for visiting your children

The end of childhood - what we lost when we dropped the age of consent

14 March 2015 9:00 am

When the state excuses underage sex, what chance do our children have?

Miriam Gross’s diary: Why use Freud and Kurt Weill to promote Wagner?

7 March 2015 9:00 am

Last week I went to the exhilarating English National Opera production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers — five hours of wonderful…

Alexander Masters’s diary: The idea that could unlock dozens of new cancer drugs

15 November 2014 9:00 am

Two million pounds can buy you consideration for a place on a medical trial! Every year untold numbers of potential…

Why there’s no such thing as an Etonian

11 October 2014 9:00 am

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the…

Today’s Disney princesses look like Russian mafia wives. This is their café

4 October 2014 9:00 am

The Disney Café is a gaudy hell on the fourth floor of Harrods, Knightsbridge. It is adjacent to the Harrods…

The truth about being a politician’s child

31 May 2014 9:00 am

It was a Friday morning in 1992, Britain had just had an election, and I was on an ice rink.…

Dyslexia is meaningless. But don't worry – so is ADHD

15 March 2014 9:00 am

There is a beautiful symmetry to all things, I think, and probably related somehow to the concept of karma. Only…

A secret from my African childhood has become a deeper mystery

22 February 2014 9:00 am

About 55 years ago, when I was about ten, my younger brother Roger and I discovered a slave pit in…

Finally, a celebrity memoir worth reading

4 January 2014 9:00 am

Unlike many celebrity memoirs, Anjelica Huston’s is worth reading. In her Prologue she writes that as a child she modeled…