Homosexuality
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
Julian Mitchell on Another Country: ‘I based it on my fury and anger and I wrote it fast and it flowed'
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country
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…
Putin: ‘Oi, Europe, you’re a bunch of poofs’
Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the…
Sochi Olympics: Why picking on gays has backfired so horribly for Vladimir Putin
Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority
Nigel Farndale’s diary: The dread moment when they announce next year's school fees
Next time I’m in a sauna I’m going to say: ‘It’s like a school sports hall on prize day in…
