Book review
How to enrich your life
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
Spoilt for choice
Nigel Simeone’s title for his edition of Leonard Bernstein’s correspondence rings compellingly, novellistically, through the force of the definite article,…
Thirty years on
Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy,…
For the fallen
We constantly need to be reminded that the consequence of war is death. In the case of the first world…
Strength in numbers
Numbers, as every mathematician knows, do odd things. But they’re never odder than in the human context. Ever since we…
Strong meat
Fans of Count Arthur Strong (and yes I know he’s so Marmite you could spread him on a cheese sandwich)…
Sleeping with the enemy
Around 200 Englishwomen lived through the German Occupation of Paris. Nicholas Shakespeare’s aunt Priscilla was one. Men in the street…
Too many Cooks…
It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately…
Thinking outside the box
Everyone loves an anniversary and the crossword world — if there is such a thing — has been waiting a…
No country for old men
‘Is he a good writer? Is he pro-regime?’ an Iranian journalist in London once asked me of Hooman Majd. Majd…
The house-party from hell
It is perhaps the most celebrated house-party in the history of literary tittle-tattle: a two-house-party to be precise. Byron and…
Nationalist stirrings
Philip Hensher on how an impassioned, chaotic group of amateur 19th-century composers created the first distinctively Russian music
The good companion
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
Seduction made easy
Spectator readers need no introduction to Peter Jones. His Ancient and Modern column has instructed and delighted us for many…
Reading a face
Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A…
Manners for beginners
Sandi Toksvig, as this book’s cover declares, ‘makes Stephen Fry look like a layabout’. The broadcaster, author, comedian, actress and…
The baby and the bathwater
Mrs Christabel Russell, the heroine of Bevis Hillier’s sparkling book, was a very modern young woman. She had short blonde…
A touch of Frost
Is there any such thing as abstract art? Narratives and coherent harmonies seem to me always to emerge from the…
The Welsh Chekhov
Rhys Davies was a Welsh writer in English who lived most of his life in London, that Tir na nÓg…
Squires, spires and serenity
I don’t know whether Bruce Bailey, a proud Northamptonshire man, agrees with the late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner that no one…
The thrill of the chase
Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a…
Market values
After reading Portobello Voices, I feel more strongly than ever that the unique Portobello market mustn’t be allowed to close.…
A rogues’ gallery
Hands up Spectator readers who can remember the American celebrities Charles Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Zane Grey,…
Beating Boney
We are accustomed to the thrill and glamour of the grands tableaux, but a nuts-and-bolts study of Napoleonic warfare makes for equally gripping reading, says David Crane
Paradise lost
Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an…
