parents
David Baddiel’s father and mother must be the most talked about parents in Britain
Colin the Dinky Toys dealer, familiar from Baddiel’s TV documentaries, emerges from this memoir as a relentless bully, but at least the ‘fantasist’ Sarah provides suitably funny anecdotes
What Miriam Cates gets right – and wrong – about declining fertility
Fulfil your civic duty. Get married. Have children. That was the message from Miriam Cates, the increasingly prominent Conservative backbencher, to guests…
Marina Warner becomes her mother’s ‘shabti’
There comes a time after the death of parents when grief subsides, the sense of loss eases, and you, the…
Problem parents: My Phantoms, by Gwendoline Riley, reviewed
Gwendoline Riley’s unsentimental fiction hovers on the edge of comedy and bleakness, and has drawn comparisons from Jean Rhys to…
What has happened to parenting?
During a recent webinar with British MPs, I learned that parents in Bradford were up in arms because their children…
How Philip Larkin f****d me up
I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You…
The kids aren’t all right
Our histrionic parenting is making today’s young people mad, unhappy and fat
The danger of no danger
We all know about helicopter parents and how terrible they can be. In New York, where I live, a mother…
Erica Jong's middle-aged dread
Who’d get old? Bits fall off, your loved ones start dropping like flies and, perhaps worst of all, the only…
How we drive our children mad
If Britain has a crisis in children’s mental health, it’s easy to see why
Glyndebourne’s Turn of the Screw: horrors of the most innocent and creepy kind
We all know that ‘They fuck you up your mum and dad’, but nowhere is this more reliably (and violently)…
Want to be a neglectful parent? Come to a festival and learn
I spent last weekend at Port Eliot in Cornwall. This is supposed to be a literary and music festival and…
I am ready to talk about my death. Is anyone else?
I am ready to talk about my death. Is anyone else?
Toby Young: It's biological, I become a caveman when my child is sick
The first sign that something was wrong with Ludo was when he complained of a tummy ache. This was after…
