Books

Having your cake

30 September 2017 9:00 am

For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up…

Sir Isaac Newton, by Godfrey Kneller (1646–1723): Newton was a secret, though fierce critic of the ‘Holy’ Trinity

Trials and Trinitarians

30 September 2017 9:00 am

John Calvin believed that human nature was a ‘permanent factory of idols’; the mind conceived them, and the hand gave…

Apostle of gloom

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…

Ratings war

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…

Wemyss Bay train and ferry station on the Firth of Clyde

Going places

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Stations, according to Simon Jenkins, are the forgotten part of the railway experience. People love the trains, the journey, the…

Portraits of Pakistan

30 September 2017 9:00 am

By his own admission, Isambard Wilkinson’s memoir of his experiences in Pakistan a decade ago as a foreign correspondent has…

Brotherly love

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the…

Alice Waters shows the Prince of Wales around her ‘Edible Schoolyard’ garden in California

Alice’s restaurant

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known…

Anthony Powell, by Henry Lamb (1934)

Of his time

30 September 2017 9:00 am

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If…

Our hero, homo erectus

Learning to talk

23 September 2017 9:00 am

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…

Deep learning

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…

Harsh, but entertaining

23 September 2017 9:00 am

When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…

Bob Marley and the Wailers at the Crystal Palace Bowl, 7 June 1980

The cult of Holy Bob

23 September 2017 9:00 am

The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…

Mykola Bokan’s photograph of his family, including a memorial to ‘Kostya, who died of hunger’, July 1933. Bokan and his son were arrested for documenting the famine — both died in the gulag

The hunger

23 September 2017 9:00 am

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…

Muddled in minutiae

23 September 2017 9:00 am

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…

Demonised by history

23 September 2017 9:00 am

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…

Bristol ablaze: anger at the Lords’ rejection of the Second Reform Bill sparked riots in Queen’s Square, Bristol, October 1831 (William James Muller)

Britain über alles

23 September 2017 9:00 am

  David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…

Ruck ‘n roll

23 September 2017 9:00 am

As every Speccie reader certainly will be aware and no doubt heartily applaud, the game of rugby league was born…

A game of cat-and-mouse

16 September 2017 9:00 am

All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…

Claire Tomalin in 2007

True grit

16 September 2017 9:00 am

As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…

Benjamin Lay (American School, 18th century)

Raising Cain

16 September 2017 9:00 am

It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…

Folk-tale redux

16 September 2017 9:00 am

Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…

Madness in Manhattan

16 September 2017 9:00 am

Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…

‘The Pacification of the Maroons in Jamaica’, by Agostino Brunias (18th century)

Redcoats and runaways

16 September 2017 9:00 am

Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during…

Swagger and squalor

16 September 2017 9:00 am

This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…