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On the evening of 13 June last year, my friend Simon went to bed early in the flat he's lived in for the past 30-odd years on an estate that's [...]

Stalin's Architect: Power and Survival in Moscow by Deyan Sudjic Thames & Hudson, [pounds sterling]30, pp. 312 The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have [...]

Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness Tim Parks Harvill Seeker, 312pp. 16.99 [pounds sterling] When I read philosophy at Oxford in the early 1980s there wasn't a [...]

Lighting up a blacked-out Britain Philip Hoare The problem with writing about Bowie is that we are all writing about ourselves. That's how important he was. For a suburban boy [...]

Welfare cuts and the housing crisis have made it ever harder for homeless beggars to escape the streets. My time in the gutter taught me how much they deserve our [...]

A COUPLE YEARS ago, I went on a three-day mindfulness retreat on Holy Isle, off the coast of Scotland, where the Kagyu Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist monastery has an outpost. [...]

Writing 20 years ago in The State We're In, his compelling diagnosis of Britain's political ills at the time, Will Hutton minted this memorable sentence: 'Unqualified shareholder sovereignty and parliamentary [...]

The past six months I've been volunteering for a homeless charity--going out, at night, with a professional outreach worker, to locate rough sleepers and offer them some sort of help, [...]

A writer reminisces about his childhood in London, taking refuge in the safety of his bedroom, surrounded by other people's stories. The similarity between this refuge and the insular world-view of Londoners is presented. The problems of writing about London while feeling claustrophobic within the city are discussed.

An original short story by Will Self John had found Vienna to be even more absurd than he remembered. The name was a problem to begin with: in German 'Wien'; [...]

The last time I remember going out with my mother it was to Hampstead Heath. We drove there in my car, then walked arm in arm along the terrace in [...]

By Will Self Umbrella, British literary bad boy Will Self's ninth novel, was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize (which Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies subsequently won). He [...]

JULIANNA MARGULIES EMERGENCY! CODE BLUE! OUR HEARTS HAVE STOPPED! Julianna Margulies, as seen through the eyes of her current leading man (Matthew McConaughey) and director (Richard Linklater), from the set [...]

Is there anything more treacherous than loving a woman? Sometimes you love her too much. Sometimes not enough. And often she just doesn't want to be loved--at least not by [...]

'All right, big man,' said the pirate DVD seller outside Sainsbury's Nine Elms, 'I got 'em all.' He fanned out his merchandise in one hand--lurid movie posters, shrunken and photocopied--while [...]

During Lent, those with Christian faith enter a 40-day period of spiritual reflection that recalls Jesus's supposed period of desert reclusion. In our own triumphantly secular society--although sometimes I think [...]

Dr Johnson's Dictionary: the extraordinary story of the book that defined the world Henry Hitchings John Murray, 278pp, £14.99 Reading is my second favourite pastime--but rereading is my favourite. Henry [...]

Albion: the origins of the English imagination Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, 516pp, £25 I feel my grandfather would have appreciated this book. Albert Henry Self was the son of [...]

London Orbital: a walk around the M25 Iain Sinclair Granta Books, 482pp, £25 Discounts at www.newstatesman.co.uk What is lain Sinclair up to? Or, put more pertinently, what is he on? [...]

Singer Marianne Faithfull feels her survival of tumultuous times is primarily due to dedication to her work. Her singing career of the 1960s was eclipsed by her relationships with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and her addiction to heroin for most of the 1970s. Her autobiography, 'Faithfull,' is scheduled to be filmed in 1999, and her singing career continues with concerts and the release of 'Vagabond Ways,' a new album.

I wouldn't exactly say it was my favourite album--I don't do listicles--but Astral Weeks by Van Morrison is probably the album considered as an album--that I've listened to most in [...]

Of the film adaptations that had been made of his work during his lifetime, J G Ballard vouchsafed to me that he liked Jonathan Weiss's version of The Atrocity Exhibition [...]

Byline: Will Self Photographs by Steven Klein Styled by Edward Enninful Good Kate, Bad Kate When I pore over these wonderful images of the model, designer, and eternal waif Kate [...]

I can remember exactly when this happened, because it was the evening Syd Barrett, late of the Pink Floyd, died. Not that I'd have registered this, were it not that [...]

Admissions: a Life in Brain Surgery Henry Marsh Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 271pp, 16.99 [pounds sterling] I confess: I haven't read Henry Marsh's first memoir, Do No Harm, nor was I [...]

On a Metro heading west from Bonne Nouvelle in the centre of Paris, the Saturday-afternoon travellers were unusually talkative, their querulous tones rising above the clanking coupling. There was only [...]

It's a weird and wacky world, people, and we reach for political theory as a way of understanding the myriad linkages ideological, emotional-between collectives of all sorts and individuals. Reach [...]

In Tom Stoppard's play ''Travesties,'' a hostile inquisitor asks James Joyce what he did during the Great War, to which he replies: ''I wrote 'Ulysses.' '' The same question might [...]

In America, God is now everywhere. Only in a Muslim country is he comparably pre-eminent In London, I was involved in an absurd case of double-booking. This meant that at [...]

Ralph Steadman' s drawings hit their target like a high-velocity bullet. Will Self, who tried to imitate his hero to disastrous effect, reveals the cartoonist's latest idea: to turn a [...]

The Situationists believed they could change the world. They ended up destroying themselves. Will Self on the death of the avant-garde When did the avant-garde die? It sounds like a [...]

It took the near-ruination of the environment for man to realise he was not separate from nature, but part of it. Will Self probes the animal origins of human culture [...]

The great quest of British publishing is profundity by association, the search for books that can convince middlebrow readers that they are reading something highbrow. WITTGENSTEIN'S POKER: THE STORY OF [...]

I first read this book in Viera Lodge, the house of my friend Christopher Bowerbank, on the island of Rousay in the Orkneys. It was Easter 1992, and the islands [...]

Peter Ackroyd's new book on London renders all others on the subject redundant. Will Self reads a contemporary masterpiece LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY Peter Ackroyd Chatto & Windus, 822pp, £25 £20 [...]

To his admirers, Rimbaud is the archetypal Romantic poet-adventurer. But was he really a slave-trader, seedy pederast and gun-runner? Will Self on the man behind the myth RIMBAUD Graham Robb [...]

In Patrick Marnham's fine book about French Resistance hero Jean Moulin (The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost, John Murray), he uses the Pantheon in Paris, where his [...]