Books
Ménage à quatre with Robert Graves
‘I have a very poor opinion of other people’s opinion of me — though I am fairly happy in my…
A feast for foot fetishists
It is always interesting to see what art historians get up to when none of the rest of us is…
Did the notorious Zinoviev letter ever exist?
This is a well-written, scrupulously researched and argued account of an enduring mystery that neatly illustrates the haphazard interactions of…
The plight of the returnee: A Terrible Country, by Keith Gessen, reviewed
If the 20th century popularised the figure of the émigré, the 21st has introduced that of the returnee, who, aided…
Anita Leslie: sparkling socialite with the Croix de Guerre
Anita Leslie knew how to tell a story. Arranging to sit for a portrait six months before she died, she…
How do we envisage Shakespeare’s wife?
Despite his having one of the most famous names in the world, we know maddeningly little about William Shakespeare. His…
Unlucky in love: Caroline’s Bikini, by Kirsty Gunn, reviewed
‘The most interesting novels are a bit strange,’ Kirsty Gunn once told readers of the London Review of Books. ‘They…
From the Iliad to the IRA: Country, by Michael Hughes, reviewed
Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the…
It’s time to rehabilitate the art connoisseur
Many art historians have written their own story of the making of an aesthete: Ruskin, Berenson and Kenneth Clark to…
The perfect guide to a book everyone should read
‘The Divine Comedy is a book that everyone ought to read,’ according to Jorge Luis Borges, and every Italian has…
The selective breeding of pets: how far should we go?
It was in his play Back to Methuselah that George Bernard Shaw honoured a lesser known aspect of Charles Darwin’s…
‘We are not cattle, we’re people’: everyday hell in Stalin’s labour camps
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to…
The unknown Auden: the poet’s dashing brother
A book that opens in a Lahore refugee camp, shifts to Cat Bells Fell, rising above the shores of Derwentwater,…
2018: a year of dangerous liaisons with Russia
First it was McMafia. After which it was the Skripals. Then the World Cup. Come the end of the year…
Brazil: a country fizzing with excitement
As the great Bossa Nova musician Tom Jobim liked to say, Brazil is not for beginners. This tends to be…
It happened one summer: Bitter Orange, by Claire Fuller, reviewed
Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler…
![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 magnificent Atkinsons: rigours of travel in 19th-century Russia
Russia has always attracted a certain breed of foreigner: adventurers, drawn to the country’s vastness and emptiness; chancers, seeking fortunes…
Vignettes of a bygone English childhood
Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan…
The horror of post-Brexit Britain: Perfidious Albion, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Edmundsbury, the fictional, sketchily rendered town in which the action of this novel takes place, is part of a social…
![The proud, lonely queen dressed up in Garter ribbon and diamonds for dinner at Sandringham every night, even when alone with the king [Getty Images]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/08/queenmary.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Queen Mary: stiff and cold, but no kleptomaniac
The best royal biography ever written is probably James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. Published in 1959, only six years after the…
Why has V.S. Naipaul rejected the Trinidad of his birth?
Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved…
Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house…
![The First Opium War: The East India Company’s Nemesis and other boats destroy the Chinese war junks in Anson Bay, 7 January 1841 [Bridgeman Art Library]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/08/opiumwars.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Global Britain was built as a narco-empire
China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
Most Popular
- Read
- Read
Cartoons
