infidelity
The art of being a mistress
Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference…
First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…
August Auguste
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
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
More family history from Knole and Sissinghurst
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
Carly Simon: funniest, most sexually blunt star of her generation
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.’](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2015/08/pepys1.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=273)
The joy of an unexpurgated Pepys — without the bother of reading it oneself
We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive…
