Hampstead
The house on the Heath
Lissa Evans has been single-handedly rescuing the Hampstead novel from its reputation of being preoccupied by pretension and middle-class morality.…
Dry cake in a red-brick crab
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and it sits like a red-brick crab on the…
The bitter taste of victory
The Parliament Hill Café is a drab glass box at the bottom of Hampstead Heath, near the farmers’ market and…
Strangers in their native land
Though it seems to begin as an affectionate memorial to his maternal grandparents, a testimonial to a rare and perfectly…
Lost in the telling
This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key…
Ack-ack guns on the Heath
The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older…
Same old ground
Hampstead’s new play about the 1984 miners’ strike was nearly defeated by technical glitches. Centre stage in Ed Hall’s production…
Touching from a distance
Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and…
Ed Miliband could be the first atheist Jewish prime minister from Primrose Hill
Last weekend, in a small New Jersey suburb, I found myself in a liquor store. Never been anywhere like it.…
Winning through
‘Experiences aren’t given us to be “got over”, otherwise they would hardly be experiences.’ The opening sentence of the first…
Let’s hear it for the toffs
This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch…
Freudian slip
Terry Johnson’s acclaimed farce Hysteria opens in Sigmund Freud’s Hampstead home in 1938. The godfather of psychobabble is ambushed by…
