America’s brutal borstals: The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead, reviewed
Novelists will always be interested in enclosed communities — or the ‘total institution’, as sociologists say. When you separate a…
Polari, the secret gay argot, is making a surprising comeback
Imagine you’re a gay man living in the year 1950. Not unnaturally, you would like to meet another gay man.…
Toy theatres on the stage: the set designs of Maurice Sendak
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression…
Not all British memsahibs were racist snobs
Despite efforts to prevent them, British women formed a part of the Indian empire almost from the start. Although the…
Time for a Tippett revival
Running the entire course of the 20th century, Michael Tippett’s life (1905–1998) was devoted to innovation. He was an English…
A clear vision of Walter Gropius the man is hard to come by
Walter Gropius (1883–1969) had the career that the 20th century inflicted on its architects. A master of the previous generation…
How Calouste Gulbenkian became the richest man in the world
Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to…
Lonely hearts and guilty minds: the world of Pamela Hansford Johnson
The revival of interest in mid-20th century novelists is one of the most positive and valuable developments of our time.…
The personality test that conned the world
The other day in the Guardian’s Blind Date column, two participants, or victims, finished off an account of their frightful…
![Photograph of an almshouse waif by Lewis W. Hine, entitled ‘Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburg Institution’ (1909) [Bridgeman Art Library]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/08/bookslead4aug.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
‘I am not a number’: the callous treatment of orphans
Orphans are everywhere in literature — Jane Eyre, Heathcliff, Oliver Twist, Daniel Deronda, and onwards to the present day. They…
The short step from good manners to lofty imperialism
In the gap between what we feel ourselves to be and what we imagine we might in different circumstances become,…
The wilder shores of excess in William Trevor’s fiction
A very prolific and long-standing writer of short stories reveals himself. William Trevor, who died in 2016, owned up to…
1968 and the summer of our discontent
’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the…
Debussy: the musical genius who erupted out of nowhere
At the end of his study of Debussy, Stephen Walsh makes the startling, but probably accurate, claim that musical revolutionaries…
The murder of a harmless Hampstead eccentric remains shrouded in mystery
‘True crime’ is a genre that claims superiority over imagination, speculation and fantasy. It makes a virtue of boredom and…
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Romance and rejection
‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…
Of his time
Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If…
Whatever happened to Alice?
In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run…
A dazzling vision
There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a…
Annie Proulx is lost in the woods
In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are…
Why we love unfinished art
The unfinished is, of course, something which tells us about the history of a work of art’s creation. A work…
The making of modern India
The other day, some anti-imperialist students were questioning the presence in their institutions of statues of Cecil Rhodes, a West…
Sartre, de Beauvoir and Sheffield teenagers; the weird glamour of existentialism
I’m certainly the wrong person to be reviewing this book, never having succeeded in understanding anything that a philosopher said…
Moguls and other Hollywood monsters
This is a very odd book that Jean Stein has compiled — about the evanescent splendour of Los Angeles, which…
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