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Flight from reality
The Autumn of the Ace begins in 1945, as the second world war ends, but both Louis de Bernières and…
Rag-tag heroes
‘Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,/ But he’ll remember, with advantages,/ What feats he did that day.’ Peter…
Communicating in code
When Martin Puchner was a child, tramps would turn up at his family home in Nuremberg to be fed by…
When history is bunk
In the 1930s curators at the British Museum, under orders from Lord Duveen, a generous donor, scoured and hacked at…
Raw Bacon
Francis Bacon once told the art critic Richard Cork: ‘I certainly hope I’ll go on till I drop dead.’ Max…
Crying for Latin America
It wasn’t so long ago that British readers, on hearing about the incompetence and corruption of Latin America’s political leaders,…
Laurels for Ardi
To comprehend ourselves and the future of humankind we have to understand where we came from. Unlike the approximately 350,000…
Unhealed wounds
At some point in his twilit, enigmatic novels of vanished lives and buried memories, Patrick Modiano likes to jolt his…
It’s that man again
Do we need another wrist-breaking book about Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and the second world war? Since Ian Kershaw…
Grand disillusion
There is nothing in world sport, ‘nothing in the history of the human race’, Ramachandra Guha modestly reckons, that can…
Journey to the unknown
Narratives of frozen beards in polar hinterlands never lose their appeal. Most of the good stories have been told, but…
Prize wide open
Betraying the Nobel opens with a detonation from Michael Nobel, Alfred’s great-grandnephew. The vice-chairman and then chairman of the Nobel…
The fog of unknowing
It’s 1981 in Richmond, south-west London. Detective Inspector Henry Hobbes is called out to a rundown house where the octogenarian…
Soft-centred satire
There was an acidic bravura and beauty in P.J. O’Rourke’s early journalism and a gleefulness in the ease with which…
Spot the literary character
For answers, visit spectator.com.au/2020/12/answers-to-spot-the-literary-character. Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
His own best creation
Cary Grant was a hoax so sublime his creator struggled to escape him. He was a metaphor, too, for the…
End-of-Times panic
Two things it may be wise to know before picking up this relatively short and surprisingly cheerful brand spanking NEW…
The making of a composer
‘My dear young man: don’t take it too hard,’ Joseph II counsels a puppyish Mozart, the colour of his hair…
Avenging Amiel
If this book becomes a Netflix blockbuster, as it surely must, Barbara Amiel presents us with an opening image. She…
Girls behaving badly
Saying you don’t like Bananarama is like saying you don’t like summer or Marilyn Monroe — a sure sign of…
You, the protagonist
When the estimable Andy Miller, the host of the Backlisted podcast, recommended a new collection of short stories on Twitter,…
A Titan of science
This book, soaked like the Dutch Republic itself ‘in ink and paint’, is enchanting to the point of escapism. The…
The glories of geography
’Tis the season of complacency, when we sit in warmth and shiver vicariously with Mary and Joseph out in the…
The triumph of independent thought
History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War,…
When all else fails…
This is an Exquisite Corpse of a novel — or if you prefer another name for that particular game, Heads,…
