Shame

“You’re looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade”. So begins a brave and inspiring TED talk from Monica Lewinsky. For those of you who weren’t following American politics in 1998, Lewinsky—then a White House intern—was the third point of a triangle that also included President Bill Clinton and a Cuban cigar. The […]

As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, hopes of a freer and more egalitarian society arising from the flower power revolution and the Summer of Love gave way to disillusion and disenchantment. The ongoing quagmire of the Vietnam War, Watergate and the 1973 oil crisis were the touchstones of this new era. The downbeat […]

Last Friday, the eve of Valentine’s Day, red roses spontaneously appeared in the windows of many of the shops lining the Chiswick High Street. The roses marked the passing of a local vagrant, 77-year-old Anne Naysmith, who notably lived for over two decades in a clapped-out black Ford Consul. What marked Naysmith out from a […]

On this site I have written extensively about unconscious shame – an invisible sense of shamefulness that cripples us through low self worth, anxiety, and emotional and sexual dysfunction. The idea of some overarching disease that’s so prevalent few are aware of its existence is not new. Since the late 19th century a number of […]

On Friday, 28 October 2011, 33-year-old Dutch engineer Vincent Tabak was convicted of murdering his neighbour, Joanna Yeates, in her Bristol apartment. The prosecution’s evidence showed that the burly Tabak gripped Yeates by the throat with one hand; the slightly-built 25-year-old was unable to resist and died from asphyxiation. Tabak dumped Yeates’s body in an […]

As a child, Lynndie England was once hit so hard with a table-tennis bat by her mother that the bat snapped. “I was brought up right,” she told Emma Brockes in an interview for the British newspaper The Guardian in January 2009, shortly after Lynndie was dishonourably discharged from the United States Army after serving eighteen months of a […]

During my adolescence, in what I only later realised was a subtly but significantly dysfunctional family, rock music was the main fault line between my father and I. I was a shy, sensitive, unconfident teenager: my rebellion was of the ingrown toenail kind; the kind that turns upon itself and festers unseen. By contrast, my […]