Books
Modernist architecture isn’t barbarous – but the blinkered rejection of it is
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest…
Glenda Jackson might have made a magnificent Hamlet
The role of Hamlet is, Max Beerbohm famously wrote, ‘a hoop through which every eminent actor must, sooner or later,…
Will all whales soon be extinct?
Nick Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, is quick to tell us he’s not…
Too much American angst: the latest short stories reviewed
In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M.…
The translator and spy: two sides of the same coin
Translators are like bumblebees. In 1934, the French entomologist August Magnan pronounced the flight of the bumblebee to be aerodynamically…
Jimmy Page is a Capricorn – that says it all
In 1957, aged 13, Jimmy Page appeared with his skiffle group on a children’s TV programme dedicated to ‘unusual hobbies’…
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…
Misplaced nostalgia
Michelle Grattan has been a part of the political landscape for nearly a half-century, so when she says that there…
![Photograph of an almshouse waif by Lewis W. Hine, entitled ‘Little Orphan Annie in a Pittsburg Institution’ (1909) [Bridgeman Art Library]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/bookslead4aug.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
‘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…
