Books
Ruck ‘n roll
As every Speccie reader certainly will be aware and no doubt heartily applaud, the game of rugby league was born…
A game of cat-and-mouse
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…
True grit
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
Madness in Manhattan
Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…
Redcoats and runaways
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during…
Swagger and squalor
This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…
Courting trouble
Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the…
Christianity triumphant – and destructive
In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of…
Looking back, losing bits
As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…
The journey of Adam and Eve
Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we…
Sappho in America
We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
Crusading passions
In W.B. Yeats’s ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’, a testing allusion emerges amid a scene of nightmare: Monstrous familiar…
Beyond Timbuktu
Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
Creature comforts
As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
Ill-met by gaslight
What is it about Victorian murders that so grips us? The enduring fascination of Jack the Ripper caught the imagination…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Punks vs. Putin
What makes for meaningful political protest? In regimes where ideology was taken seriously (such as the Soviet Union or America…
Armageddon averted
From 1945 to 1992 the Cold War was the climate. Individual weather events stood out — the Korean War, the…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
