Hampstead

Diary

27 May 2023 9:00 am

Bombs over London: V for Victory, by Lissa Evans, reviewed

22 August 2020 9:00 am

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

14 March 2020 9:00 am

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

16 April 2016 9:00 am

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

5 March 2016 9:00 am

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

6 June 2015 9:00 am

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

20 September 2014 9:00 am

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…

Decent and enjoyable production: Tom McKay (Brutus) and Anthony Howell (Cassius)

The sweating, dust-glazed saints at the Hampstead Theatre tells us nothing new about the miners’ strike

12 July 2014 9:00 am

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

7 June 2014 9:00 am

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

19 April 2014 9:00 am

Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it.…

Photograph courtesy of Tina and Terence dooley

Why did Penelope Fitzgerald start writing so late? 

2 November 2013 9:00 am

‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…

Terrific: Barnaby Kay (Keith) and Tamzin Outhwaite (Briony)

Toffs rule! 

2 November 2013 9:00 am

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

21 September 2013 9:00 am

Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…