Who needs a surgeon to look good?
Women of a certain age are told to forget plastic and make the most of natural beauty
Scrubs up nicely
Lucy Ellmann finds out in Katherine Ashenburg's Clean how we learnt to wash and go
One man’s lonely struggle to get justice for ugly people
Lucy Mangan: Gonzalo Otalora has written a book entitled ¡Feo! (Ugly!), which calls for the taxation of good-looking people to counteract the natural advantages they have over munters
Remember Me by Melvyn Bragg
'Ah Melvyn,' Natasha said. 'Or should I call you Joseph ... The dialectic of your Northern simplicity and your Sartrean modernity pierces my Gallic heart.'
My private hell
She was a young, successful writer with a flourishing career and a new baby. So why did she come within moments of throwing herself from a train? Stephanie Merritt describes the crisis that almost claimed her life
The getting of wisdom
At 35, Lorna Martin had come to a crisis in her life. Turning to therapy for some answers, she recorded her progress in a weekly column that is now being published as a book. But, wonders Zoe Williams, is she really any the wiser?
Gray’s anatomy
Sexual intercourse had not officially begun, according to Larkin. For the playwright Simon Gray, then a Cambridge undergraduate, that was all too true. Inexperienced and naive, he yearned for that to change. Finally, it did ...
Second-hand spooks
Do we need another look at Victorian spiritualism, asks Kathryn Hughes, after reading Servants of the Supernatural by Antonio Melechi
A tale of two mothers
Five months after Julia Hollander's daughter Imogen was born with severe cerebral palsy, she found herself at breaking point. But her painful decision to hand over her child to a foster carer led to the creation of an 'extraordinary extended family'
Are you running right?
If you keep getting injured when you run, you may need to improve your technique. Sam Murphy reveals the seven commonest mistakes runners make.