Before the magisterial mess of Trevor Thomas’s house, the orderly houses that most of us live in seem meagre and lifeless — as, in the same way, the narratives called biographies pale and shrink in...

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on...

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about...

Biographers rue the destruction or loss of letters; they might also curse the husband and wife who never leave each other’s side, and thus perform a kind of epistolary abortion.

In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And...

What Helen of Troy did in her spare time and what she was ‘really like’ are not questions that torture us.

The concept of the psychopath is, in fact, an admission of failure to solve the mystery of evil—it is merely a restatement of the mystery—and only offers an escape valve for the frustration felt by...

Life, of course, never gets anyone’s entire attention. Death always remains interesting, pulls us, draws us. As sleep is necessary to our physiology, so depression seems necessary to our psychic economy. In some secret way,...

I hope each of us owns the facts of her or his own life,” Hughes wrote in a letter to the Independent in April, 1989, when he had been goaded by a particularly intrusive article....

…a fundamental rule of journalism, which is to tell a story and stick to it. The narratives of journalism (significantly called “stories”), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating...