San Francisco
Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn
Even the most liberal-minded reader might be surprised by the amount of crack cocaine, LSD, alcohol and casual sex the poet indulged over the course of 50 years
The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends
In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis
The rise and fall of bohemia
In the Kunsthalle Praha, a smart new gallery in Prague, a Scottish professor from UCLA called Russell Ferguson is trying…
The amazing grace of Bruce Lee’s fight scenes
Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…
San Francisco is decaying
During the pandemic, a growing number of people in floridly psychotic states screamed obscenities at invisible enemies, or at my…
Sun, sex and acid: Thom Gunn in California
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
They think they’re better than you
Nancy Pelosi’s salon visit. Bill de Blasio’s gym session. Gavin Newsom’s French Laundry soirée. Cockburn can’t even keep up with…
A very San Franciscan president
The most under-appreciated fact of the 2020 presidential campaign is that Kamala Harris, the woman likely to soon replace the…
What does Kamala Harris really believe?
When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself…
Kamala Obama?
Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as…
San Francisco in decay
District Attorney Chesa Boudin personifies everything that’s wrong with San Francisco: weak on drugs, weak on crime, weak on racist…
A love letter to San Francisco’s mean streets
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…
Missive from a living fossil: Little Boy, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, reviewed
In his adopted city of San Francisco, the poet, publisher and painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti is venerated to levels nearing those…
A strange vibration
Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of…
The unforeseen dangers of Uber and Airbnb
In Silicon Valley, renting out is the new selling —and renting out stuff that belongs to other people can be…
Dolts, Doormats and FGM: theatre to make you physically sick
Wow. What an experience. A 1991 movie named Dogfight has spawned a romantic musical. We’re in San Francisco in 1963.…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Isabel Allende's Ripper doesn't grab you by the throat
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
