Books
1956: the year of living dangerously
The book of the year has long been a favoured genre in popular history, and is a commonplace today. While…
The Punch and Judy country that’s beyond a joke
In recent weeks, North Korea allegedly developed a hydrogen bomb and hangover-free booze. This would be a worrying combination in…
The realm of England: from the Pennines to the Pyrenees
Most people know more about the 12th century than they think they do. This is, as Richard Huscroft reminds us…
Moguls and other Hollywood monsters
This collection of Hollywood tittle-tattle is moderately interesting, unpleasantly salacious and largely unsourced, says Philip Hensher
David Litvinoff: queeny aesthete or street-hustling procurer?
Even David Litvinoff’s surname was a concoction. It was really Levy. Wanting something ‘more romantic’, he appropriated that of his…
Losing a Crown in the National Portrait Gallery
The cafe was full of connoisseurs of the scones. As he bit into his flapjack a sinister uncoupling took place…
At the going down of the sun
One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva…
Catullus, Clodia and the pangs of despised love
Reading Daisy Dunn’s ambitious first book, a biography of the salty (in more ways than one) Roman poet Catullus, it…
Ben Judah feels like a stranger in his native London
‘I was born in London,’ Ben Judah tells us early in this vivid portrait of Britain’s capital, ‘but I no…
Unreliable Narrator
If a clock can be a household’s totem then we remain hopeful ours will show us an accurate blue moon…
The writing on the wall at Saqqara is plain to see
Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20.00. Tel: 08430 600033
Culloden: the bloody end of the Jacobite dream
What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without…
A deadly role reversal
Who would you trust to take a blade to your brain? Medical schools and hospitals, arbiters of this outrageous intimacy,…
Easy Street
Roller skating down the main road in the cycle lane, her easy, smooth and flowing scissor stride on booted castors,…
The great austerity con
Not so long ago I stumbled into a little pop-up in Hoxton: a delightful tearoom hardly bigger than a walk-in…
Inside the mind of a murderer
For one week in July 2010, the aspiring spree killer Raoul Moat was the only news. ‘Aspiring’ because he didn’t…
Alexander Humboldt: a great explorer rediscovered
The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was once the most famous man in Europe bar Napoleon. And if you judge…
If you read one spy novel this year, read Real Tigers
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
Location
Old friends, we scarcely speak of death or dying. As ever, the displacements continue, just as when we used to…
David Cesarani's final, fascinating, wrong-headed book
David Cesarani, Research Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London, died at the age of 58 on 25…
Location
Old friends, we scarcely speak of death or dying. As ever, the displacements continue, just as when we used to…
Unreliable Narrator
If a clock can be a household’s totem then we remain hopeful ours will show us an accurate blue moon…
Losing a Crown in the National Portrait Gallery
The cafe was full of connoisseurs of the scones. As he bit into his flapjack a sinister uncoupling took place…
Easy Street
Roller skating down the main road in the cycle lane, her easy, smooth and flowing scissor stride on booted castors,…
Location
Old friends, we scarcely speak of death or dying. As ever, the displacements continue, just as when we used to…
