Homosexuality

Griffith in 1961, at the height of his powers

A portrait of a gay boxer

3 October 2015 9:00 am

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

29 August 2015 9:00 am

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

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…

Charles Moore’s Notes: I’ve rarely written a word in favour of Edward Heath, but I don’t believe these accusations

8 August 2015 9:00 am

As someone who has rarely written a sentence in praise of the late Sir Edward Heath, I hope I can…

Who would have thought that about Ted Heath? Well…

8 August 2015 9:00 am

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

8 August 2015 9:00 am

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

25 July 2015 9:00 am

I wonder who will win the battle for Tim Farron’s soul — the Guardianistas or God? This is assuming that…

How Spain got blamed for the Spanish flu — and where to find Ebola on a map

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Plagued by stigma The World Health Organisation told doctors to stop naming diseases after people, places and animals so as…

Life after Vera: Patrick Gale’s hero finds happiness towards the end of the Saskatchewan line

21 March 2015 9:00 am

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

14 March 2015 9:00 am

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)

24 January 2015 9:00 am

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

10 January 2015 9:00 am

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

22 November 2014 9:00 am

Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm

Watch out Pope Francis: the Catholic civil war has begun

8 November 2014 9:00 am

Uncertainty over how much reform Pope Francis wants is splitting his church into factions

Cat among the pigeons: Jennifer Fry, the exotic beauty who so disrupted life at Farringdon House in the 1940s

My mad gay grandfather and me

18 October 2014 9:00 am

Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves

Tennessee Williams on the stage set of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine

Charles Scott Moncrieff (left) had a deep personal affinity with Proust (right). His rendering of 'À La Recherche du Temps Perdu' is considered one of the greatest literary translations of all time

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

16 August 2014 9:00 am

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

26 July 2014 9:00 am

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

28 June 2014 9:00 am

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

5 April 2014 9:00 am

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?

29 March 2014 9:00 am

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

Julian Mitchell with Rob Callender rehearsing ‘Another Country’

Julian Mitchell on Another Country: ‘I based it on my fury and anger and I wrote it fast and it flowed'

22 March 2014 9:00 am

Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country

An almost masochistic docility: E.M. Forster in his youth

What E.M. Forster didn't do

8 March 2014 9:00 am

‘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

22 February 2014 9:00 am

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

15 February 2014 9:00 am

There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…