Chris Mark in his castle. Photograph: Marisa Balletti-Lavoie

A party, 101 princesses and an eccentric millionaire: Jon Ronson on a mysterious castle – and what it taught him about masculinity in crisis

When my son texted me from a Connecticut fortress in the middle of the night with an alarming message, it set me on a quest to understand the bizarre lifestyle of its owner

Jon Ronson
Friday 21 August 2026

Iawoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in Connecticut.

From what I could tell, as I frantically tried to piece together the night’s events, one of Joel’s friends had been invited to a party being held by a stranger she’d met that week on Tinder. So Joel and two others went along for the ride. But when they arrived, they found the man’s home so bizarre that Joel did something he’d never done before – he sent me the coordinates of his location and a photograph, just in case.

Review

The Castle by Jon Ronson review – bizarre tales of modern masculinity

A journalist embarks on a wild goose chase that might – or might not – be informative about the male condition

Anthony Cummings
Tuesday 8 September 2026

 

Recovering from surgery at home in upstate New York in 2023, Jon Ronson awoke to a string of texts from his adult son about a weird evening he just had at a stranger’s castle in Connecticut. Having gone along with a friend who’d been invited to a party there, he arrived to find a few lost-looking young women with the sixtysomething host, Chris Mark, a steel heir filming a reality show about “101 princesses” whose first rule was “Never say no to King Chris”.

100 years after John Coltrane’s birth, secret tapes are emerging

‘This was social music’ … John Coltrane.

100 years after John Coltrane’s birth, secret tapes are emerging. What can they tell us about jazz’s great rulebreaker?

The sax star turned his back on fame to embrace free jazz. Caught on a tape machine hidden in an overcoat, newly revealed recordings show how he did it


Ammar Kalia

Fri 11 Sep 2026 08.00 BST

In August 1965, at the height of his fame, saxophonist John Coltrane headlined the DownBeat jazz festival in Chicago. Taking to the stage with a new member of his band, young experimentalist Archie Shepp on tenor, Coltrane’s quartet blew through a series of jagged and free improvisations, straying from structured compositions and, instead, hurling down sheets of sound so loud and aggressive that they reportedly caused widespread walk-outs. DownBeat’s own reviewer later wrote: “They gave as tasteless a display of musicianship as I’ve ever heard … Shepp and Coltrane seemed to be more interested in trying to out-honk, out-squeal and out-bleat each other than in playing music.”

Patti Miller at the grave of Marcel Proust in the Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris.

Reading Proust aloud: ‘How can it be that deeply flawed and terrible humans have the capacity to create?’

This article is more than 3 years old

One hundred years after his death, our daily reading shows us that humans can conjure the utterly extraordinary

Patti Miller
Saturday 11 November 2022

In September 2018, my reader, Anthony, opened Swann’s Way, the first book of In Search of Lost Time, on our front veranda and read aloud the seemingly innocent opening line: “I used to go to bed early”. From that moment – and almost every evening for the next four years – I was lost in a rarefied parallel reality created more than 100 years ago on the other side of the world. Marcel Proust, that neurotic frail Frenchman from the late nineteenth century, became my daily companion.

The French rose from Manchester: in search of Proust’s forgotten muse

This article is more than 2 years old

The poignant story of the Englishwoman Marie Nordlinger is told in a new book about her life with the writer

Kim Willsher in Paris

Sat 22 Jun 2024 16.00 BST

In December 1896, Marcel Proust was introduced to a captivating young Englishwoman in Paris.

Marcel Proust

Letters

What is missing from the Guardian’s 100 best novels list

Readers share their reflections on the best works of fiction in English, and ask whether popularity or lightheartedness disqualified books from consideration

22 February 2026

As an avid reader, I was excited to go through your recently published book list (100 best novels, 16 May). However, I swiftly became disillusioned at the old-fashioned and frankly elitist lens used to judge the “best”. Why were there so few modern books? Why does “best” so often seem to equate to misery?

The article introducing your list (Who’s in, who’s out, and how many have you read? The story behind our 100 best novels list, 16 May) says “Never has such a list been more needed” and that “reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit”, adding “we are here to help”. But this list will not help non-readers get into reading.

Marcel Proust on What Writing Is

 

Marcel Proust writes, with only the faintest irony, that “the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature.”

Marcel Proust
on What Writing Is

In the last volume of “In Search of Lost Time,” Proust famously describes
the transformation of himself as an author.

 

By William Benton

February 8, 2023

Proust died at fifty-one, in Paris, of pneumonia, on November 18th, and last year was the centenary of his death. Since I first read “In Search of Lost Time,” his immense and unique autobiographical novel, a long passage about what writing is—from “Time Regained,” the seventh and last volume—has stayed with me. It takes place at the mansion of the Princess Guermantes, where the narrator has been invited to a musical reception. On his way to the Guermantes’s, he encounters by chance M. de Charlus, a member of the Guermantes family. Ancient and ruined by a stroke, Charlus is like a ghost of a possible future for the narrator himself. At this point in the novel, the narrator is nearly middle-aged, bored, over-sophisticated, and aware that, for lack of talent, he is not the writer he had dreamed of becoming. Everything in the first six volumes is behind him—Swann, Gilberte, Vinteuil, Albertine—although unwritten as yet.

Marcel Proust

Proust: The Search by Benjamin Taylor review – a beguiling biography

How did a simpering, high-class layabout write a work of such profound moral seriousness?

Kathryn Hughes

Thursday 19 November 2015

Athird of the way through this beguiling biography, Benjamin Taylor offers a statement from Marcel Proust that he believes explains why the (arguably) greatest novelist of the 20th century dribbled away nine years of his life translating Ruskin into French before getting down to writing À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. “There is no better way of becoming aware of what one feels oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself that which a master has experienced. In this profound effort that we make, it is our own way of thinking, together with the master’s, that we bring to light.”

Funny and full of sex / Why you should read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

Marcel Proust

LETTERS

Funny and full of sex: why you should read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time

Readers strike an encouraging note for those sceptical of the joys of Proust, saying it has plenty to make it worth perservering

Tue 2 Jun 2026

I read all seven volumes of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time over a nine-month period. In answer to Mike Bromberg (Letters, 26 May), a great deal happens besides the famous madeleine incident: the advent of electric lighting, motorcars and aeroplanes, not to mention endless romances and social intrigues. My memory is that every hundred pages or so of tedium would yield five to 10 pages of the most revelatory reading that I have ever experienced. Was it worth it? Totally. Would I do it again? Probably not. But I won the bet.
Bill Gaver
London

¿Proust o Joyce? / No time for tomes like these

 

Letters

No time for tomes like these

Daunted by Proust or Joyce? Letters from Ian Arnott, Mike Bromberg and Andrew Keeley on giving up on a long read

26 March 2026

Dave Patten says Proust’s In Search of Lost Time was unreadable (Letters 22 May). When I was a student of French in the 1970s I attempted to read it in French, but gave up after volume one. The only person I knew who had read it all in the original French was one of our lecturers who told us he had done it to pass the time one long summer vacation when he was laid up with gout. À chacun son gout, I suppose.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough

El Floridita, where daiquiris, chandeliers, and Hemingway’s shadow still linger © Photo by Jane Ammeson

Hemingway's Havana

Exploring the tumultuous life and lasting legend of Ernest Hemingway on the island he called home

Jane Ammeson

4 January 2026

I drove into Old Havana in a pink Chevy convertible with pink and white striped leather seats and fins so sharp that even a shark would go green with envy. It’s exactly like the car my great aunt bought after her divorce, but had to sell when she remarried, as her new doctor husband said it was too sexy.

"Hemingway House Key West, Florida United States" by Michelle Maria, available under CC BY 3.0. Cropped from original

Key West through Hemingway's eyes

How the writer's favorite island continues to preserve his stories, traditions, and spirit

Jane Ammeson

4 September 2026

Returning from Spain, where he had covered the Spanish Civil War along with Martha Gellhorn, a young blonde he had met at Sloppy Joe’s, his favorite bar, Ernest Hemingway discovered his wife Pauline had spent an extraordinary amount of money to build a pool in their backyard, the first one on the island of Key West.