Books
Books of the year – part one
Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop,…
Celebrating the 1918 Armistice resulted in thousands more deaths
Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice…
Boys’ Own adventures in the war-torn Middle East
Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need…
Baron Haussmann: the man who set Paris straight
Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera…
Unfolding mysteries: the drama of drapery in Italian art
The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its…
Farewell to cricket as the archetypal English game
At the beginning of August this year, the England test team played what is supposed to have been the 1,000th…
The Statue of Liberty is a deeply sinister icon
Immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century discovered in Upper New York Bay, after a long, uncomfortable…
The Victorian melodrama that led to murder and mayhem
Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, a young housemaid in a respectable Mayfair street discovered that her master,…
The ancient Greeks would have loved Alexa
Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were…
A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…
Germaine Greer continues to shock and awe
There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world,…
Must Ovid be hijacked by the alt-right?
Who could possibly take exception to the Stoics? One of the more passive arms of Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism required its…
Francis of Assisi’s life in poetry will stay in the mind forever
This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long…
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 novel view of Brexit: Middle England, by Jonathan Coe, reviewed
Jonathan Coe writes compelling, humane and funny novels, but you sometimes suspect he wants to write more audacious ones. He…
In the garden of good and evil: the power of the poppy
America has for years been struggling with a shortage of the drugs it uses to execute people, yet it was…
It’s thought that counts when it comes to good prose
This is a sentence. As is this — not an exceptionally beautiful one, but a sentence all the same, just…
Insomnia is key to my creativity
A genre of memoir currently in vogue involves entwining the author’s personal story with the cultural history of a given…
The vampire’s role in Marxist philosophy
‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t…
Treat in store: Unsheltered, by Barbara Kingsolver, reviewed
In a living room in Vineland, New Jersey, in the 1870s, a botanist and entomologist named Mary Treat studied the…
Just a man: Demystifying Napoleon
Who says that the ‘great man’ theory of history is dead? Following hard on the heels of Andrew Roberts’s magnificent…
If only we could hibernate all winter
As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant…
A little of Philip Larkin’s letters goes a long way
On 13 September 1964, at the age of 42, Philip Larkin began writing to his mother Eva (his ‘very dear…
It’s entirely possible to die of a broken heart
The numbers invite awe: three billion beats in a lifetime; 100,000 miles of vessels. But on the hospital floor, wonder…
![[Credit: Julie Edwards]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/10/Mark_Kermode.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Mark Kermode: I longed to be a pop star
In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first picked up an instrument, the UK record business was a very different place.…
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