Suicide

Ideation, from suicide to management speak

7 July 2018 9:00 am

‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked…

Who is Sylvia – what is she?

7 October 2017 9:00 am

In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…

The man who disappeared

19 August 2017 9:00 am

Walking out of one’s own life — unpredictably, perhaps even without premeditation and certainly without anything approaching a plan —…

At death’s door

8 July 2017 9:00 am

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in Covent Garden and we are all learning how to kill ourselves. The venue…

Why the World Service is worth every penny

5 March 2016 9:00 am

What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of…

A memorial for 92-year-old Olive Cooke, Britain's longest serving poppy seller, who sold poppies for the Royal British Legion every year after her husband was killed in 1943. (Photo: Getty)

Why it's better to give money to a beggar than to a charity

30 January 2016 9:00 am

No good deed goes unpunished. This is a saying that applies with special poignancy to Olive Cooke, the 92-year-old poppy…

Conservative youth politics is noxious, but pitiful

5 December 2015 9:00 am

Why are so many Conservative activists so noxious?

Charles Moore’s Notes: cheap trickery in the Economist’s assisted dying campaign

28 November 2015 9:00 am

Because, it says, of its ‘liberal values and respect for human dignity’, the Economist has put out a film about…

If the government have their way, will Radio 4’s dramas be broken up by ads for dentures?

1 August 2015 9:00 am

‘Bait by Cartier,’ she growls as her priceless diamond bracelet is strapped to a piece of rope and dropped overboard…

Amy Winehouse: ‘not a fake bone in her tiny body’

Masterly and heartbreaking: Amy reviewed

4 July 2015 9:00 am

Asif Kapadia’s documentary about Amy Winehouse, whom Tony Bennett describes as ‘one of the truest jazz singers that ever lived’,…

Turing, Snow White and the poisoned apple

9 May 2015 9:00 am

As a young student, the atheist Alan Turing — disorientated with grief over the death of his first love Christopher…

For his supposed involvement in a conspiracy against Nero, Seneca is ordered to commit suicide — as depicted in The Nuremberg Chronicle , 1493

Men behaving badly: Nero, Claudius and even Seneca could be intensely cruel to women — and fish

21 March 2015 9:00 am

They lived in barrels, they camped on top of columns, or in caves: the lives of the sages are often…

‘Another terrible thing...’: a novel of pain and grief with courage and style

21 February 2015 9:00 am

Nobody Is Ever Missing takes its title from John Berryman’s ‘Dream Song 29’, a poem which I’d always thought related…

Should ‘suicide’ mean pig-killing?

8 November 2014 9:00 am

There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking…

The jilted bride

Charles Saatchi’s new book of photos makes me feel sick

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking…

Radio 4 deserts the British bird. Shame on them!

6 September 2014 9:00 am

A strange coincidence on Saturday night to come back from the cinema, having seen a film about a woman fighting…

Why I’m against posthumous pardons, even for Alan Turing

26 July 2014 9:00 am

Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…

Assisted dying? Ancient religion was all for it

12 July 2014 9:00 am

There is something mildly unexpected about religious groups’ hostility to euthanasia. After all, in the ancient world one of the…

The terminal confusion of Dignity in Dying

5 July 2014 9:00 am

The closer you look at the campaign for ‘assisted dying’, the less reassuring it all becomes

William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher

8 February 2014 9:00 am

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…

Death by Dior, by Terry Cooper - review

10 August 2013 9:00 am

This book may sound like it’s going to be about high fashion, but it’s actually about Nazism, satanism, incest and…