Jeffrey Meyers The Dreadful Cruise of David Foster Wallace …….Philip Roth, blurbing on the dust wrapper of Saul Bellow’s collected…

Horatio Morpurgo XR Meta Incognita The journalist Raymond Keene was eating in a West End restaurant last summer when XR’s…

Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou Dancing with Sophie Taeuber-Arp Dear Sophie, ……….I’m thinking of all the ways the body unfurls in the first…

Jeffrey Meyers Unwritten Works: Woolf, Mann and Hemingway Many writers, to soothe their egos, inflate their reputations and warn off…

Eimear Ryan The Lecturer-Students Trope and the Era of the Strong Female Character  I sometimes wish that I’d been the…

Jeffrey Meyers Autobiographies of Friends: A Unique Genre I’ve taken special delight in holding the copies given to me and…

The following extract is an essay from the collection Tomorrow is Too Late ed. by Grace Maddrell. Grace has collected testimonies…

Will Stone Closing the Door to the Continent There is more than ample evidence, both currently and historically, that there…

Christiana Spens A Masochistic Education: Lana Del Rey, White Femininity and the American Dream Western society has long persisted with its…

Philip Womack In Praise of the Lesser Known Siblings of Mythology   When fossicking through the cornucopia of classical mythology,…

Vanessa Nicolson Mother’s Desk I’m sitting at my mother’s desk, overlooking the gardens of the Archaeological Museum. The ochre walls…

Jonathan Crane Untitled My book, We Need to Talk, was published in July. When I submitted the manuscript, I’m not…

Jeffrey Meyers The Joys of Depression, The Glamour of Gloom: Bishop and Larkin Though Elizabeth Bishop (1911-79) and Philip Larkin…

In 1944 the Soviet Occupation of Romania led to the imposition of a communist regime in the country. My grandmother’s grandfather, Onisifor Ghibu, an independent politician who played a role in the creation of Greater Romania in 1918 and co-founded the first Romanian university in Transylvania, was the first professor at the university he taught at to be ‘purged’ and interned in a provisional prison for his ‘anti-Soviet’ activity. Carted to a prison camp in a wasteland […]

The application for a blue plaque in Hallam Street, Central London, to commemorate Stefan Zweig’s residence in the city from 1933–1939, was turned down in 2012. English Heritage argued then that the Austrian writer’s ‘London connections did not appear strong enough’ and that his ‘profile has never been as high in Britain as elsewhere.’ Even at the time, this puzzled many. Zweig had been made so well-known to a new generation of English readers, mainly through […]

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), eleven years his junior, both contracted syphilis and died at the age of thirty-seven. Despite their completely different backgrounds, character and way of life, these freakish outsiders formed a strange friendship during the last four years of Vincent’s life.  They were drawn together by their passion for art, which relieved the agony of their lives.  They respected each other’s work, exhibited together […]

After decades of hearing Looney Tunes’ Sylvester the Cat say ‘thuffering thuccotash’ my friend Dirk, a Native American, told me what Succotash actually is. Succotash is a Native American dish. Its name is Anglicised from the Narragansett word ‘msickquatash’ meaning cooked corn. I’m not sure how we got to the subject of succotash, but he told me that it was one of those dishes that everyone made differently, although it always had corn and beans in it. His family’s recipe had fatty […]

It is two months into your new job when someone mentions, in passing, that your microphone fails to capture the first few words of every sentence you utter, so no one has heard almost anything you’ve said. Until that moment, you believed that you were uninsightful and off-topic and you actually cried, getting off one call, at the feeling that you were a kind of business ghost, haunting meetings without ever provoking a response. You felt that your disappearance might […]

Eager to write le Carré’s biography, unwilling to proceed without his permission and naively hoping for his help, I wrote a brief letter on September 3, 1989 and sent it to him through his agent.  I introduced myself, mentioned my five previous biographies, offered to send him copies, gave two references from prominent English authors, asked if he would authorize a life to make sure it would be done by a capable and responsible writer, and suggested a meeting […]

Dear B.C., I write to you because accountancy is tiring my patience and I have developed some better schemes which will propel me to fame. It is melancholy to consider the bank statements and tax returns of common people while they hang in doubtful circumstances; and, only being trained to contend with positive numbers, I have not enjoyed examining the arrears, debts, and bankruptcies which now litter my desk, from which I can not extract my usual fees or […]

If you want to understand history, you need to go out and find its stories. You have to dig them out, unearth them, like archaeologists uncovering traces of earlier civilizations. These stories, the really important ones, are never written down in books. I spent much of one hot summer’s day in Haifa up in a cool, sun- dappled apartment on a quiet residential street at the bottom of the steps leading up to the Shrine of the Báb and its gardens on Mount Carmel […]