On a cross-Channel ferry at the start of her honeymoon, my mother met Clement Attlee. In those innocent days, there was nothing odd about a former prime minister exchanging a few words with a stranger as the two of them queued for a cup of tea and a rock bun. Some ministers were protected but no one took the process very seriously. When he was home secretary in the mid-1960s, Roy Jenkins suggested that the uniformed policeman who was... read more

The subtitle of Oliver Soden’s biography of Noël Coward suggests that the reader will be presented with versions of Coward and be talked through each. This reader could discern only one life: that of performer. Although he made the occasional departure from the world of greasepaint – such as when he worked for the government before and during the Second World War – his life was basically one massive act of self-reinvention from struggling actor living with... read more

Visiting a new supermarket is a disorienting experience. On the surface, it’s all familiar: the sliding doors, the black rubber conveyor belts, the flecked linoleum. But then you can’t find the baskets, you’re in the wrong queue, you’re not in a queue, you can’t enter this queue with a trolley. As the familiar slips, you become uncomfortably aware of the unspoken rules you might be transgressing. After all, you entered the supermarket as a customer and must... read more

I was asking my father for a bit of help with my homework, sticking newspaper cuttings into a scrapbook. He was flabbergasted when he saw that the subject was the fall of Dien Bien Phu, the event in 1954 which marked the end of the French presence in Indochina. It was just over twenty years later, as the Americans were retreating from Saigon. I was studying the French withdrawal from its colonies as history whereas he felt he was still living through it. I had the same... read more

From the global financial crisis of 2008–9 until not so long ago, central banks ruled the world. Ben Bernanke, head of the Federal Reserve, and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, regularly appeared together in the Forbes list of the top ten most powerful people in the world, alongside Vladimir Putin and the Pope. That is not the case today. The successors to those masters of ... read more

On 28 February 1989, a matter of days after the publication of what he had described as the first volume of a tetralogy, the Swiss writer Hermann Burger kept a long-held promise and killed himself. The world could not say it had not been warned: from his first novel, Schilten (1976), about a school teacher who prepares his pupils for death, to his collection of aphorisms Tractatus logico-suicidalis (1988), a gathering of over a thousand... read more