Homosexuality
A portrait of a gay boxer
I don’t like boxing. If I ever get into a boxing ring, I’ll be in the corner with the governor…
The trials of living with a High Court judge
This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…
An epic study of trauma and friendship in the age of self-invention
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
Who would have thought that about Ted Heath? Well…
In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation…
Can Putin ban homosexuality and endorse polygamy? Yes he can
The Kremlin is tying itself in ideological knots as it tries to make new friends in the Muslim world
Tim Farron, an evangelical Christian, is the victim of a secular inquisition
I wonder who will win the battle for Tim Farron’s soul — the Guardianistas or God? This is assuming that…
Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
Hock and partridge help fascism go down in 1930s London
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…
My four great loves were unrequited (though I had a chance with Ginger Rogers)
I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies…
The misguided bid to turn Alan Turing into an Asperger’s martyr
When I first heard the story of Alan Turing in my late teens I made what must be quite a…
Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
Watch out Pope Francis: the Catholic civil war has begun
Uncertainty over how much reform Pope Francis wants is splitting his church into factions
My mad gay grandfather and me
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Why I’m against posthumous pardons, even for Alan Turing
Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…
A swan to die for at Sadler’s Wells
Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Was Roy Jenkins the greatest prime minister we never had?
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
What E.M. Forster didn't do
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
How to get around South Africa's many boundaries
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…