Olivia Laingâs new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess thatâs... Read more »
Feminist Harriet Wistrich had been a solicitor for 20 years, many of them with the noted human rights firm Birnberg Peirce (the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six) when, aged 55, in 2015,... Read more »
To write fiction about art is notoriously hard. Inventing bad art is easy, an excellent parlour game, but to imagine a successful artist you have to create a body of work that... Read more »
Never in living memory has the north of England felt so far removed from the economic and political power base of London. That the most – the only? – prominent northern accent... Read more »
Keith Haring’s career began underground, but soon zoomed to stratospheric altitudes. His cartoons of irradiated babies, attributed to an anonymous scribbler known as Chalkman, began to crawl along the walls of New... Read more »
A Year of Last Things by Michael Ondaatje (Cape, £14.99)After a break of nearly 20 years, Ondaatje has returned to poetry, ruminating on sliding doors moments in life, “as those torn lines... Read more »
In January 2002, during his State of the Union address, President George W Bush said that in “four short months” the US had “rallied a great coalition, captured, arrested and rid the... Read more »
Politicians mince or mash words for a living, and the virtuosity with which they twist meanings makes them artists of a kind. Their skill at spinning facts counts as a fictional exercise:... Read more »
It’s more than 100 years since the birth of Greek-American soprano Maria Callas, and still no one in the opera world has rivalled her. Equally resilient is her reputation as a prima... Read more »