Friendship
Trick or treat
The pros and cons of being hacked
Wild life
I used to live in Mogadishu for months at a time, cooped up in compounds behind fortified walls. Venturing on…
To the friend who dropped me
I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie…
Dear Mary
Q. I have hired a private room in a restaurant in order to give dinner to a large number of…
The unwritten rules of sending Christmas cards
No one sends Christmas cards any more. Except that I do, and you might, and a few other people do…
Dear Mary: Is it ever acceptable to blow my own trumpet?
Q. A friend of 30 years moved abroad three years ago. He then was diagnosed with throat cancer but mercifully…
My friend’s death taught me what Easter really means
The bravest thing I’ve ever seen was 93-year-old Albert’s decision to die and the days after in which he stuck…
Britain has become a country of braggarts and show-offs
Over the past 20 years, the old British trait of self-deprecation has been killed off. And in its place, boasting…
Letters
Meeting halfway Sir: If our Brexit negotiator David Davis has not read Robert Tombs’s wonderful article ‘Lost in translation’ (21…
Return to the lost city
During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…
Call yourself a friend?
Should we be surprised that friendship isn’t always mutual? That is one of the findings of a team of researchers…
Dating stinks
Why I went looking for love in the armpits of strange men
Your problems solved
Q. Former colleagues, with whom I got on very well in the context of the office, are buying a house…
When did we become a nation of narks?
There’s a danger that in what follows your columnist may seem to be recommending an attitude. Please don’t think that.…
Dear Mary
Q. What can you do when disorganised friends say they would love to come to a concert with you but…
Diary
Last Tuesday I tried to sign up to a new life. My wife and I argued, slightly. ‘I don’t think…
Fast train to friendship
I had five decades of delight with the Everly Brothers – and it all began on the Flying Scotsman
From brilliance to burn-out
Thick, sentimental and with a narrative bestriding four decades, Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings feels above all like a Victorian novel,…
