Books
Portrait of an American childhood: A Long Island Story by Rick Gekoski reviewed
Success as a rare books dealer, academic, publisher, broadcaster and author of several non-fiction books — at 70, Rick Gekoski…
David Sedaris, the current king of humorists, is often not funny at all
Since the 17th century, a ‘humourist’ has been a witty person, and especially someone skilled in literary comedy. In 1871,…
Born again: My Year of Rest and Relaxation, by Ottessa Moshfegh, reviewed
The new novel by the author of the 2016 Booker shortlisted Eileen is at once a jumble of influences —…
Bruce Lee: weird, gruesome and oh-so-cool
Every cinema-loving person has a favourite Bruce Lee moment. My own comes towards the end of Enter the Dragon, the…
![Mandela revisits his prison cell on Robben Island in 1994 [Getty]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/mandela.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
What Nelson Mandela really craved in prison: Pond’s Cold Cream
So much rubbish has been written over the years by those who feared, revered or pretended to know Nelson Mandela…
Shades of the Mitfords: After the Party, by Cressida Connolly, reviewed
At the beginning of After the Party, Phyllis Forrester tells us she was in prison. While inside, her hair turned…
A cold archaeological gaze: In the Garden of the Fugitives, by Ceridwen Dovey, reviewed
Visiting Pompeii, it is hard to miss the garden of the fugitives. It is on every other postcard in the…
Adam Smith analysed human behaviour, not economics, says Simon Heffer
Jesse Norman is one of only three or four genuine intellectuals on the Tory benches in the House of Commons.…
Kyoto is all that is left of Japan – more’s the pity
‘Much of what I say may turn out not to be true.’ Hardly the ideal beginning to a guided tour.…
Who needs a plot? asks Anne Tyler
Willa Drake’s second husband calls her ‘little one’, even though she is over 60 and the mother of two grown…
‘T’ is for Trotskyite
Varlam Shalamov’s short stories of life in the Soviet Gulag leave an impression of ice-sharp precision, vividness and lucidity, as…
A melancholy talent with a genius for send-up – Flann O’Brien was his own worst enemy
It is tempting to compare two highly intelligent, learned and gifted young Dublin writers, suffering under the burdensome, Oedipal influence…
Turn off and tune out
All good non-fiction writing shares certain characteristics: consistent economy, upbeat pace and digestible ideas that logically flow. Tech writers have…
Can a paedophilic relationship ever be excused?
Sofka Zinovieff’s new novel, Putney, is an involving, beautifully written, and subtle account of an affair in the 1970s between…
Travel literature
Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the…
Portugal’s entrancing capital has always looked to the sea
Paris, Venice, Montevideo, Cape Town, Hobart. There are cities, like fado, that pluck at the gut. In my personal half…
Beautifully out of sync: All the Lives We Never Lives reviewed
‘Myshkin’ wants ‘a tiding ending’ to his life and has settled down to write his will. An ageing Indian horticulturalist,…
Chopin’s Piano is an eclectic trip through 19th-century romanticism
It is easier to say what this book is not than to describe what it is. It is not a…
Nothing doing
There is a long and noble history of books about doing nothing. In the 5th century bc the sage Lao…
First Novels
Katharine Kilalea is a South African poet who has written a startlingly good first novel. OK, Mr Field (Faber, £12.99)…
Caryl Phillips’s new novel manages to make Jean Rhys boring!
The problem with writing about writers — and a particular blight on the current vogue for autofiction — is that…
The Stuart supremacy
Few twists of political fortune are as discombobulating as the youngest child making off with the family inheritance. Richard III,…
Historian David Edgerton says the ‘British nation’ lasted from 1945 to 1979, the miner’s strike its death knell
It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s…
Two new books by barristers chronicle the perilous state of our justice system
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’ says Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, Part II. Mostly,…
New York times
Seven years ago Stella Tillyard, a successful historian of the 18th century, broke into historical fiction with Tides of War.…
