Prince Albert: The Man Who Saved the Monarchy by A.N. Wilson Review
Of all the people Prince Andrew might blame for his current predicament — the press, the US Department of Justice, sundry young women, God forbid, himself — it is unlikely that he is railing against his great-great-great-grandfather Prince Albert, and yet it is that paragon of princes, born 200 years ago last week, who is […]
Sex and art by the Grand Canal: how Peggy Guggenheim took Venice
In the 1940s, the heiress fled New York and, with a makeshift gallery, became the star of Venice. But she was not the first woman to dazzle the city. As the Biennale opens, Judith Mackrell tells their story on the Guardian. Judith Mackrell’s The Unfinished Palazzo: Life, Love and Art in Venice is published by […]
My ‘wild child’ cousin, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington
Throughout her childhood, Joanna Moorhead never heard a good word from her family about her cousin. When she went to Mexico she found out why she had abandoned them 60 years earlier… Read the full article here. The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead is published by Virago on 6 April, £20.
Harriet Harman’s Unfinished Business
Harriet Harman, Labour’s former deputy leader, is as roundly Roundhead as Mr Clark was confidently Cavalier. Her new autobiography, “A Woman’s Work”, is as serious as his books are riotous. Continue reading The Economist article here. ‘I don’t want to be not-liked. It’s just that nobody did for nearly 20 years.’ Read her interview […]
Lu Spinney on communicating with brain damaged patients
A new scientific breakthrough has enabled patients with locked-in syndrome to communicate. Lu Spinney, whose son suffered catastrophic brain damage in a snowboarding accident but lived for a further five years, tells of the prolonged agony of silence. What constitutes a meaningful life? It depends on the individual being asked the question. To me […]
Ayobami Adebayo speaks about Stay with Me in the bookseller
Stay with Me is published in March 2017 by Canongate.
BOB. Bestseller. Film star. Magazine editor.
The much anticipated film adaptation of A Street Cat Named Bob by James Bowen premiered on 3rd November followed by a special edition Street Cat Bob takeover in The Big Issue. Go behind the scenes with James and Bob and read interviews with the cast here. A Street Cat Named Bob is at number one on the Sunday Times […]
‘He Had His Reasons’: Colin Barrett’s essay on the Hawe family tragedy for Granta.com
On Sunday evening, 28 August 2016, in their home near the small rural town of Ballyjamesduff in County Cavan, Alan Hawe put a knife through the throat of his wife Clodagh before going upstairs to strangle and stab to death his three sons, Liam, Niall and Ryan. The three boys’ beds were distributed between […]
The Decay of Politics by Philip O Ceallaigh
The condition of peace and prosperity sometimes votes for its own destruction. Those that argue loudest for abandoning sane, well-tested arrangements often do so in the belief that the whole structure is so secure that it can’t fall apart. Forget about Brexit for a moment. Take the Austro-Hungarian Empire; in its last half-century, it was […]
Danielle McLaughlin revisits ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ for The Paris Review Daily
In the summer of 1986, I finished secondary school, and that autumn I enrolled in a secretarial course in Cork City. It was a course of a kind that I suspect no longer exists, with bookkeeping exercises involving sheets of carbon paper, classes in shorthand, typing learned on manual typewriters. I have a hazy recollection […]