Books
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Formidable black talons…
I often feel slightly sorry for the British nature writer. It’s not an attractive emotion — it sounds patronising —…
Heroines of the Soviet Union
Klara Goncharova, a Soviet anti-aircraft gunner, wondered at the end of the second world war how anyone could stand to…
The evil that men do
The first thing to say about Claudio Magris’s new novel is that it is, in an important sense, unreadable. There…
Art of diplomacy
The language of diplomacy often requires nuance and subtlety. Not infrequently, it needs to be opaque, to enable differing interpretations;…
Spirits from the vasty deep…
‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…
Towering extravagance
The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…
Rules of behaviour
It’s the constant dilemma of the pop science author: how to write something flashy enough to grab readers, but solid…
Down – if not out – in Paris
Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who…
A cacophony of complaint
What sort of monster gives a bad review to a book by someone who was gang raped as a 12-year-old…
His own worst enemy
One fail-safe test of a writer’s reputation is to see how many times his or her books get taken out…
The dark side of creativity
In Eureka, Anthony Quinn gives us all the enjoyable froth we could hope for in a novel about making a…
Black prince or white knight?
We cannot know for sure how Edward the Black Prince earned his sobriquet. For some it was the volatile mixture…
Drowning in mud and blood
George Orwell’s suggestion that the British remember only the military disasters of the first world war is certainly being borne…
… trailing strands in all directions
Letters of Intent — letters of the intense. Keen readers of Cynthia Ozick (are there any other kind?) will of…
A strange vibration
Among the many curiosities revealed in this book, few are more startling than the fact that at the height of…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
By Patten or design?
My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to…
Something in the water
‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
Diagnosing diversity
Our Constitution and the debates leading to it make clear our founders assumed citizens would enjoy five great liberal democratic…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
