infidelity
Campus antics: Seduction Theory, by Emily Adrian, reviewed
Two creative writing professors in a ‘deeply rewarding’ marriage separately decide to press the self-destruct button
Bogart and Bacall’s first film together might as well have been called Carry On Flirting
Just a few months after the release of To Have and Have Not, with its sassy, sexy script, the film’s stars were married. But, as in many of Bogart’s films, romance also involved intrigue
Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed
Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible
The data-spew about Bob Dylan never ends
In his latest volume of biography, Clinton Heylin spares us no details about Dylan’s misogyny and cranky obsessions during his almighty midlife crisis
The thrill of the chase
The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’
The devil comes calling
The sinister Sergeant Bertrand arrives in a ‘provincial, mediocre’ Russian town to wreak havoc in the lives of a couple mourning the loss of their son
A sadder and a wiser man
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
The silent muse
Jane Morris, the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite model, remains as enigmatic as ever, says Frances Wilson
Mission accomplished
Nigel Farage was never even an MP, but Michael Crick argues convincingly that he is one of the top five…
High life
Gstaad The jokes about keeping a mistress are old and I’ve yet to hear a truly funny one (‘The difference…
First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…
August Auguste
In 1959 the formidable interviewer John Freeman took the Face to Face crew to the 81-year-old Augustus John’s studio. The…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
Two enquiring minds
Samuel Pepys, wrote John Evelyn, was ‘universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things’ and ‘skilled in music’. John Evelyn,…
Mouldering hats and wedding veils
In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her…
A legend in her own time
I usually dread the final 15 minutes of a celebrity interview: the awkward section during which the writer must steer…
![Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.’](https://new-dev.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/pepys1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Lust for life
We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive…
