infidelity

Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed

24 February 2024 9:00 am

Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible

The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends

4 November 2023 9:00 am

In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis

Keeping a mistress was essential to John le Carré’s success

14 October 2023 9:00 am

The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’

The devil comes calling

8 July 2023 9:00 am

The sinister Sergeant Bertrand arrives in a ‘provincial, mediocre’ Russian town to wreak havoc in the lives of a couple mourning the loss of their son

A.N. Wilson has many regrets

10 September 2022 9:00 am

‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…

Was Jane Morris a sphinx without a secret?

18 June 2022 9:00 am

Jane Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite model, remains as enigmatic as ever, says Frances Wilson

The party’s finally over for Nigel Farage

12 March 2022 9:00 am

Nigel Farage was never even an MP, but Michael Crick argues convincingly that he is one of the top five…

The art of being a mistress

29 August 2020 9:00 am

Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference…

Pamela Lane in 1957, the year after Look Back in Anger was first performed. On seeing the play, she was heard to exclaim: ‘Oh no, not the ironing board...’

First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane

31 March 2018 9:00 am

Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…

Portrait of Gabrielle Renard and Jean Renoir. Gabrielle was an important part of the Renoir household, both as nanny and artist’s model

August Auguste

7 October 2017 9:00 am

In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…

Stage fright

2 September 2017 9:00 am

Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…

They shared a love of books, beekeeping, print-collecting, alchemy, geometry, music, astronomy and the English language: John Evelyn (left) and Samuel Pepys

Two enquiring minds

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…

Vita Sackville-West, c. 1940

More family history from Knole and Sissinghurst

16 April 2016 9:00 am

In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…

Getty images

Carly Simon: funniest, most sexually blunt star of her generation

30 January 2016 9:00 am

I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…

Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.’

The joy of an unexpurgated Pepys — without the bother of reading it oneself

22 August 2015 9:00 am

We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive…