“If I had to pick one sentence I’ve heard more than any other in the last six years of conversation about economics, it would be ‘Why aren’t people more angry?’ The Brexit vote showed that plenty of them are. But perhaps it expressed that other feeling, the one of bewilderment, just as much. ‘Take back control’ is a cynical but extremely astute pitch to an electorate in that state of mind.”

On the relationship between conservation, British farmers, and a possible Brexit.

Money is an idea that we all agree to believe in.

On the response to the Paris attacks.

On the manifestos that mass shooters leave behind.

On the sex lives of the castrati.

An accidental evening with Yeats, in the spring of 1937.

On Keith Richards’ autobiography.

There’s some very sensible advice on how to take drugs, too.

Remembering jazz musician Ornette Coleman.

On being kicked out of Doris Lessing’s house.

The Houthi coup in Yemen.

“The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account.”

On women, monarchy, and breeding.

Being friends with Susan Sontag was thrilling, but also “shot through in the end with mutual irritation.”

“What I had going for me was teen rage, contempt impervious to offers of compromise; the power of the mask capable of turning ice to marshmallow, and all the time in the world, all the ability to sustain it without surrendering.”

“When constant revisionism and re-invention is under way, what does it profit a biographer to drag the weary ‘facts’ before us?”

Recalling a sexual assault.

Perhaps you didn’t know that in addition to being a very funny writer, Kafka’s life yields a lot of comedy too.

"What’s it like to be giving birth at home, and see blood pooling between your legs, and look up at the ashen faces of a birth attendant, a midwife, a spouse? What’s it like to feel the earth tremble and see the roof and walls of your home or school fall towards you? More to the point, in terms of survival: what happens next? It depends. Not just on the severity of the injury, but on who and where you are."

Creating, and then attempting to dismantle, a fake persona based on a man who died in 1984.

On spectacular saintliness, holy anorexia, and female hysteria.

Inside Greece’s far-right movement.

On Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik and the rise of Islamophobia in Norway.

On the importance of skateboarding.