To B or not to B
Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of…
The Battle for Britain
The post The Battle for Britain | 12 November 2022 appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Tricks of the trade
Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively.…
The curious case of Malcolm MacArthur
Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism…
Delights to behold
If you were to ask which single business concept deserves to be more widely known, I would be hard-pressed to…
Age of unreason
The attempt to topple the Scottish Enlightenment
What Boris should have said at Cop27
I was a little disappointed by Boris Johnson’s argument against Britain paying reparations for the damage done to developing countries…
Hide and seek
Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but…
Russian roulette
The evolution of ‘tactical’ nuclear war
We’ve lost interest in our dependencies
Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British…
Privates on parade
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the…
Books of the year II
A further selection of recent books enjoyed by our regular reviewers – and a few that have disappointed them
The spoils of war
Wine-making can have a tragic dimension, and rarely more so than with Italian Pinot Nero: that is, Pinot Noir. It…
Gross profit
Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds…
A nagging sense of loss
Even if notions of beauty are treacherously fugitive, and even if interpretations of history are nowadays subject to revision by…
Going to ground
Do you ever think about the ground beneath your feet? I do. Having read a number of popular science books…
A monument to ornithology
The text of this well illustrated book is mostly John James Audubon’s, from journals unpublished in his lifetime. Part I…
Wacky words and ideas
The standard complaint of anyone doing a Christmas gift books guide is that the books aren’t up to much. I…
A prison within a prison
Nowhere in this extraordinary prison memoir do we find out why Fatos Lubonja was sentenced to imprisonment in Spaç, the…
Via sacra
This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins,…
The frustrations of a society painter
At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately…
A portrait artist of rare skill
Novels about art are often strange, vain affairs. After all, writing about artists, especially fictional ones, can seem like a…
An Argentinian nightmare
‘In Argentina,’ Mariana Enriquez writes in Our Share of Night, ‘they toss bodies at you.’ It is an arresting, chilling…
