Hampstead
Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
A tax on intellectuals: Terrace Cafe at the British Library reviewed
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the…
The Parliament Hill Café is awful. I’m sorry they saved it
The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and…
The polite anti-Semitism of 20th-century Britain
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
Owen Sheers disregards the first commandment of novel-writing: to show, not tell
This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key…
Beer and skittles and Lucian Freud and Quentin Crisp – a Hampstead misery memoir
The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older…
The sweating, dust-glazed saints at the Hampstead Theatre tells us nothing new about the miners’ strike
Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production…
When the big-boobed whisky monster met the upper-class snoot
Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and…
If Ed Miliband can’t be our first Jewish prime minister, he can still be our first atheist Jewish prime minister from Primrose Hill
Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it.…
Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late?
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
Toffs rule!
This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch…
Hysteria is a pile-up of unmotivated absurdities
Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…
