Love
My father was the best of England
I always think of my father at this time of year. In particular, I go back to the summer of…
The diary of a dying man: Graham Caveney’s poignant cancer memoir
With months to live, Caveney looks back on his childhood, muses on favourite writers, decries NHS underfunding and rejoices in his beloved partner, Emma
Why am I so unlucky in love?
One of my exes is trying to get me arrested. I discovered this when I received an email from the…
Lovely slice of Cosmic Scouse: Michael Head & the Red Elastic, at EartH, reviewed
One of the more bizarre but recurring tales about how the music of Liverpool has been shaped over these past…
Could I find a girlfriend on a Guardian Blind Date?
Was a Guardian Blind Date the answer?
James Bond and the Beatles at war for Britain’s soul
‘Better use your sense,’ advised Bob Dylan: ‘take what you have gathered from coincidence.’ John Higgs is a master of…
The ancient art of love spells
An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall…
Momentous decisions: Ruth & Pen, by Emilie Pine, reviewed
Emilie Pine writes about the big things and the little things: friendship, love, fertility, grief; waking, showering, catching the bus.…
Irish quartet: Beautiful World, Where Are You?, by Sally Rooney, reviewed
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
The dark side of Venus — goddess of war as well as love
Bettany Hughes has spent a decade, she tells us, exploring the origins of the goddess Aphrodite, first for a BBC…
Love and loneliness prevail in the latest short stories
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction,…
For Julian Barnes, the only story is a love story — and it’s inevitably sad
The story, as it emerges, feels both familiar and inevitable. A bored 19-year-old student, on his university holidays in mid-century…
Was Maria a virgin, a prude or a woman who liked to torture?
Gstaad Last week I dreamt of a girl I met in the summer of 1953, in Greece. I had never…
That’s another year gone and, against the odds, I’m still here
A fruity voice on the train’s announcement system said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, make sure you have all your belongings, family…
Hello trees, hello sky, hello armoured riot police
What a beautiful day, I thought, as I nodded to the porter in the bowler hat and stepped out of…
Nabokov’s love letters are some of the most rapturous ever written
Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher
