Books

Blithe spirit

5 November 2016 9:00 am

Lady Anne Barnard is a name that means almost nothing today, but her story is a remarkable one. She defied…

Deadlier than the male

5 November 2016 9:00 am

Teenage girls all over the world have suddenly developed electro-magnetic powers that can be unleashed on anybody who bugs them.…

Intimations of immortality

5 November 2016 9:00 am

A preoccupation with death is felt from the start of Margaret Drabble’s new novel, which opens with Francesca Stubbs, in…

Bewitching stuff

5 November 2016 9:00 am

Richard Francis’s new novel covers ostensibly familiar ground. Set in and around Boston in the 1690s, it tells the story…

When the music changes

5 November 2016 9:00 am

In 2011 the New York Times’s chief dance critic, Alastair Macaulay, asked: How should we react today to ‘Bojangles of…

November Wine Club I

5 November 2016 2:17 am

Start your festive stockpiling right here, right now. Why wait until the week before Christmas to buy Berrys’ scrumptious own…

Post-election discussion

5 November 2016 2:13 am

After the American people have voted, what next for the US and the rest of the world? Join Sir Christopher…

Christmas cartoon offer

5 November 2016 2:11 am

Purchase a Spectator cartoon now to receive free framing in time for Christmas. Enter FRAME16 at checkout for your free…

Festive Wine lunch II

5 November 2016 2:07 am

Owing to overwhelming demand our business editor, Martin Vander Weyer, and our drinks editor, Jonathan Ray, will be hosting a…

Private view

5 November 2016 2:04 am

The Spectator invites you to a private breakfast view of Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts on 26…

Winemaker’s dinner

5 November 2016 2:00 am

Join us for a Spectator dinner featuring the wines of Armand de Brignac, a much-talked-about champagne house. Emilien Boutillat will…

Meaty matters

29 October 2016 9:00 am

I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruffled into white-tipped skirls by…

A big beast in Hush Puppies

29 October 2016 9:00 am

It always used to be said that, if it had been up to Guardian readers, Ken Clarke would certainly have…

TB or not to be

29 October 2016 9:00 am

If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine,…

A tale of two prisons

29 October 2016 9:00 am

The Marshalsea was the best and worst place for a debtor to be imprisoned. From 1438 until its closure in…

A race apart

29 October 2016 9:00 am

South African democracy has not, on the whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the…

Tormented genius

29 October 2016 9:00 am

Married as I am to an antiquarian book dealer, and living in a house infested with books and manuscripts, I’m…

Shiver me timbers

29 October 2016 9:00 am

Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a character put on his sealskin kamiks, muskrat hat, wolfskin mittens and…

Highly undesirable

29 October 2016 9:00 am

Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see them and take them pretty much as they come,…

Fierce indignation

29 October 2016 9:00 am

In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When…

The great Soviet gameshow

29 October 2016 9:00 am

In the opening chapter of her history of Soviet Central Television, Christine E. Evans observes two Russian televisual displays of…

Walking the walls of Theodosius

29 October 2016 9:00 am

Hagia Sophia (the Church of the Holy Wisdom) in Istanbul is arguably the most important building in our Judeo-Christian tradition.…

Life’s Too Short to Drink Bad Wine

29 October 2016 1:13 am

We had a fine party at 67 Pall Mall last night to launch the new edition of Simon Hoggart’s Life’s…

Intoxicated with ink

22 October 2016 9:00 am

One of the charms and shortcomings of biography is that it makes perfectly normal situations sound extraordinary. According to Michel…

A bit player in the great drama

22 October 2016 9:00 am

There’s a glorious scene in Astrid Lindgren’s first Pippi Longstocking book in which her fearless, freckled heroine strides to the…