madness
The English lieutenant’s Frenchwoman: the tragic story of Adèle Hugo
Mark Bostridge’s obsession with Victor Hugo’s beautiful daughter almost rivals her own infatuation with Albert Pinson, the naval officer she pursued around the world
There’s nothing shameful about hypochondria
Caroline Crampton describes the real agonies of people obsessed with their fragility, revealing that her own hypochondria stems from a childhood cancer diagnosis
Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed
In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life
Have we all become more paranoid since the pandemic?
Covid-19 proved devastating to our self-confidence and faith in others, says Daniel Freeman, who describes the ‘corrosive’ effects of mistrust on individuals and society
The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore
I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of…
The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Haunted by the past: Last Days in Cleaver Square, by Patrick McGrath, reviewed
At the risk of encroaching on Spectator Competition territory, what is the least surprising thing for any given narrator in…
Driven to distraction — the unhappy life of Vivien Eliot
Do you think your mother slept with T.S. Eliot? That was the question I needed to ask the 98-year-old in…
Excess and incest were meat and drink to the Byrons
Excess, incest and marital misery were in the blood. Frances Wilson uncovers several generations of infamous Byrons
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
Val McDermid’s Diary: Facing 3,000 choices at the Edinburgh festival
There are many good reasons for being in Edinburgh in August, when the population doubles and nobody looks twice if…
The artist who only turned into a major painter once he became a homicidal maniac
Charles Dickens’s description of Cobham Park, Kent, in The Pickwick Papers makes it seem a perfect English landscape. Among its…
Women go off the rails
The Lost Child begins with a scene of 18th-century distress and dissolution down by the docks, as a woman —…
They sought paradise in a Scottish field — and found hunger, boredom and mosquitoes
Dylan Evans, the author of this book, was one of those oddballs who rather looked forward to the apocalypse, because…
Why the first self-help book is still worth reading: The Anatomy of Melancholy anatomised
Caspar Henderson 6 March 2021 9:00 am
Footling around on the internet recently, I stumbled on a clip of a young woman singing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ to…