Books

Crime fiction for Christmas

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Imagine receiving an anonymous suicide note addressed to you by mistake. Would you try to find that person, to help…

Poor bewildered beasts

10 December 2016 9:00 am

If you’ve ever read a history of the early days of the Foundling Hospital, you’ll remember the shock: expecting to…

The unkindest cult of all

10 December 2016 9:00 am

When I was 22 I met a man called Yisrayl Hawkins who said his coming had been prophesied in the…

Roving the world

10 December 2016 9:00 am

In these books, two handsome and popular telly adventurers consider, from viewpoints that are sometimes overly autobiographical, the culture of…

Double trouble

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Cousins is a curious novel. If I’d been a publisher’s reader, I’d have consigned it to the rejection pile after…

The lonely passion of Beatrix Potter

10 December 2016 9:00 am

The story of the extraordinary boom in children’s literature over the last 100 years could be bookended with a ‘Tale…

Dark and graphic

10 December 2016 9:00 am

A woman birthing bloated speckled eggs from her supernaturally swollen womb. Sushi screaming and squirming. A skull-shaped sweet, bearing the…

We’re all snobs really

10 December 2016 9:00 am

D.J. Taylor’s clever dissection of snobs is really two books in one. Scattered throughout are entertaining, delicious (initially), solemnly related…

Snow on snow

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Here is William Diaper in 1722, translating Oppian’s Halieuticks (a Greek epic poem on the loves of the fishes): As…

Rhinoceros pie, anyone?

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Forgotten? Though I can rarely attend their dinners (in Birmingham), I am a proud member of the Buckland Club (motto:…

Arms and the woman

10 December 2016 9:00 am

In August 1939, Clare Hollingworth, a 28-year-old aid-worker, had been employed as a reporter for less than a week by…

A girl in a million

10 December 2016 9:00 am

All readers know that good novels draw us into other worlds. I cannot think of another, however, which so alarmed…

Little and large

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Here are two approachable and distinctive books on our churches, great and small. Simon Jenkins’s cathedrals survey follows his earlier…

Port in any storm

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Cometh the hour, cometh the book, and so Christmas brings us once again a tidal wave of titles relating to…

A marvel and a mystery

10 December 2016 9:00 am

In 2013, Pavel Dmitrichenko, disgruntled principal dancer of the Bolshoi, exacted a now infamous revenge on the company’s artistic director,…

Love at first bite

10 December 2016 9:00 am

Legends cling to Bram Stoker’s life. One interesting cluster centres on his wife, Florence. She was judged, in her high…

Spot the British Author

10 December 2016 9:00 am

The post Spot the British Author appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment…

To earth from heaven

10 December 2016 9:00 am

When I was a child, the highlight of the summer holidays was when my cousin Simon came to stay. We…

Answers to ‘Spot the British Author’

8 December 2016 3:00 pm

1. Kingsley Amis 2. Beatrix Potter 3. Graham Greene 4. Salman Rushdie 5. Nick Hornby 6. Arthur Conan Doyle 7.…

High priestess of horror

3 December 2016 9:00 am

A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her…

Children’s books for Christmas

3 December 2016 9:00 am

Maurice Sendak, no mean judge, observed that William Nicholson’s Clever Bill was ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’.…

Rifling through a writer’s desk

3 December 2016 9:00 am

Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book by Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book at all. It’s a celebration of the…

Ripeness is all

3 December 2016 9:00 am

‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally.…

A choice of gardening books

3 December 2016 9:00 am

Garden design usually breaks out of its confines to become part of the general consciousness only in Chelsea Flower Show…

From man to beast and back again

3 December 2016 9:00 am

If there’s one shared characteristic of the so-called ‘new nature writing’ it is a failure, with a few notable exceptions,…