Books
Falling out with Love
Volcanic fallings out within bands are an ever-recurring motif in the history of rock music. There’s an obvious reason for…
A choice of art books
Suitably for a year so full of cataclysms and disturbing portents, 2016 is the quincentenary of the death of Hieronymus…
Pandora’s box
While I’ve read plenty of books worse than Television: A Biography, I can’t immediately think of any that were more…
Blackouts and white coats
In the cult Steve Martin film The Man With Two Brains, a doctor falls in love with a surgically removed…
A mystery, even to herself
Armed with their tiny Leicas and Nikons, most of the great postwar ‘street’ photographers liked to be unobtrusive; they wanted…
Heaven, hell and Northampton
A century ago, Sir Hubert Parry set Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ to music. The lyric had been written 100 years earlier and…
Christmas cookbooks
New books by Raymond Blanc and Pierre Koffmann retell the truth that British food came back from the brink. If…
Joking apart
A horse walks into a bar.… David Grossman takes the opening line of an old joke for his title, which…
For king and countryside
In July 1915 the poet Edward Thomas enlisted as a soldier with the Artists’ Rifles, even though, at the age…
Atlas shrugs
In his Forward Prize-winning collection of 2014, A Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, Kei Miller’s hero describes…
Skin in the game
Terry Smith is in the news again. Not for being a Brexiteer — though he’s been committed to that cause…
Mount Gay Rum
Jonathan Ray visits the oldest rum distillery in the world and gets his hands dirty blending My travels round the…
The Joy of Chocolate
In Grenada, Jonathan Ray attempts to extend his life by eating plenty of dark chocolate. I’m in the House of…
Obituary: Eric Christiansen
Over the past year, we have lost two names cherished by Spectator readers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic for 20…
Secrets of the universe
A few years ago, in Berne, I visited the apartment where Einstein wrote his theory of special relativity, which changed…
Full steam ahead
To write, and indeed to read, a history of considerable range, both in terms of chronology and of subject matter,…
A fateful squiggle on the map
When turbaned warriors from Daesh (or Isis) advanced on Raqqa in Syria two years ago, they whooped wildly about having…
In life divided
The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy,…
Christmas stocking fillers
The gift books come in all shapes and sizes this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat and thin,…
Things fall apart
Ali Smith is that rare thing in Britain: a much-beloved experimental writer. Part of her attraction for readers is that…
A choice of first novels
Constellation by Adrien Bosc (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) picks nimbly along the divide between fiction and non-fiction. It’s really a speculative…
Up where the air is clear
Robert Twigger’s father was born in a Himalayan hill resort and carried to school in a sedan chair. His son,…
London Notebook
The new government seems to be struggling with the logistical intricacies of removing Britain from the European Union. I can…
Letter from the Caribbean #2
Jonathan Ray gets his head around how to create the perfect rum cocktail. I’ve lost count of the number of…
Letter from the Caribbean #1
Jonathan Ray gets a taste for rum but knows when it’s time to stop. Excitement in the Caribbean concerning Prince…
