the French revolution
A marriage of inconvenience: The Bride Stone, by Sally Gardner, reviewed
His capricious father’s will leaves a young English doctor needing to find a wife within two days and seven hours of his return home from revolutionary France
‘Poor devils’: the hopeful scribblers of the French Revolution
Buoyed by visions of immortality, Parisian hacks were ready to ‘explode’ in revolutionary fervour, but those who didn’t perish in the Terror would often struggle to make a living
The subversive message of Paradise Lost
The great poem is mostly about revolution: how much individuals can revolt against God, father, church and king without bringing all the heavens down upon their heads
The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’
Matthew Lockwood traces Britain’s long history as a haven for refugees and argues that the nation has benefitted greatly over the centuries as a result
The great divide
According to Nina Power’s forceful and rather unusual What Do Men Want?, we in the West are currently engaged in…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
An imaginative interpretation of the past
Antiquaries have had a bad press. If mentioned at all today, they are often derided as reclusive pedants poring over…
Private passions of a public moralist
Ruth Scurr reveals what an impulsive, life-loving individual Mary Wollstonecraft was
Insects of the hour
Did you go to college? If so, then it is overwhelmingly likely that you have been the recipient of a…
Life on a plate
In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…
The glory and the misery of Louis XIV’s France
I was flicking through an old copy of The Spectator the other day, one of the issues containing contributors’ ‘Christmas…
Horrors of the house of wax: Little, by Edward Carey, reviewed
The reader of Edward Carey’s Little must have a tender heart and a strong stomach. You will weep, you will…
A clash of two cultures
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…
To the ends of the earth
What’s in a name? The identity of the author offers a clue to one of the themes of this intriguing…
One événement after another
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…
Not-so-evil genius
It is almost inconceivable that there could be a more densely detailed book about Napoleon than this — 800 crowded…
The fear behind the Terror
Why did the French Revolution go so wrong, descending into a frenzied bloodbath in just five years? Because by 1794 all trust had vanished, and the country had literally run out of cash, explains Ruth Scurr
Daring a fleeting smile
In 1787 critics of the Paris Salon were scandalised by a painting exhibited by Mme Vigée Le Brun. The subject…
Suffering in silence
A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were…
The great pamphlet war
What is the origin of left and right in politics? The traditional answer is that these ideas derive from the…
