Reportage - Five Dials

Shakespeare would have done well in any generation

Raymond Chandler to Jamie Hamilton

‘I don’t know why the hell I write so many letters,’ Raymond Chandler once wrote, in a letter. ‘I guess my mind is just too active for its own good!’ Chandler d... Read more

American Fall

Writers reflect on September 2018, and touring during the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court

Preti Taneja, Jennifer Croft, Chika Unigwe, Shobha Rao, Danielle Evans, Sarah Weinman, Sharmila Sen, Diana Henderson, Jeanne McCulloch Preti Taneja I arrive... Read more

Sinatra Sang in Sentences

by Joe Moran

The style guides say: keep your sentences short. Write cleanly, cut as many words as you can, and don’t overburden your reader’s short-term memory by delaying t... Read more

An Album Can Last a Day

by Sam Byers

It doesn’t so much begin as swoop into land: thirty seconds of silence followed by the gathering swell of sputtering static and a sighing, weary chorus of what ... Read more

Social media is a kind of refuge. It’s a refuge from dealing with the more enlivening conflicts within one’s real life.

Adam Phillips in conversation with Nicholas Barrett

In his 2016 biography of Sigmund Freud, Adam Phillips describes the development of psychoanalysis as an attempt by the secular Jews of Vienna to recreate the ex... Read more

Who Rules the World

An appreciation of Noam Chomsky’s endless factcheck of American power

‘If you remember Chomsky is relevant, that his thinking might have shaped you in some dusty moment in the past, go back to the text.’

How to move on from Scorpio season

Your stars read by Sophie Mackintosh

The first step is to move blinking into the light. Then, maybe, to survey the wreckage. Then, maybe, to renounce the fear in your dirty heart. It is a fact u... Read more

‘We can certainly learn from the past. But it doesn’t mean that anything’s going turn out in the same way.’

A conversation with Antony Beevor

One day I took the train to see historian Antony Beevor in rural Kent. On the drive to his place from Bekesbourne Station, through country lanes, we passed ‘Osw... Read more

Brits on the Water

by Jamie Brisick

I’m grateful for the new pub, and on a Sunday afternoon my wife, two sons and I will while away a few hours watching soccer on the at-screen TV, drinking a pint... Read more

¡Qué tontos los ingleses!

The callousness of Brexit; the empathy of poets. By Martha Sprackland

Brexit feels personal. In my late teens I lived in Madrid, the solar plexus of the body of main-land Spain. I spend my life returning to it, now, an always-retu... Read more