Books
William Waldegrave: too nice ever to have been PM
‘Lobbying,’ writes William Waldegrave in this extraordinary memoir, ‘takes many forms.’ But he has surely reported a variant hitherto unrecorded…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Last day
None of the teachers who taught us were around that final afternoon at Grammar school — probably frightened of being…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Last day
None of the teachers who taught us were around that final afternoon at Grammar school — probably frightened of being…
Go Set a Watchman should never have been hyped as a ‘landmark new novel’, says Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Love nest or den of iniquity? Cliveden has always been shrouded in mystery and scandal
Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust…
Welcome to the world of Big Byz
The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator,…
Rich, thin and selfish in Manhattan
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
Mission near impossible
Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June…
France’s favourite bedtime story: a sanitised version of the French Revolution
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…
Anyone for eel-pulling?
Scholarship for its own sake has rather gone out of fashion, although I’m sure Spectator readers would be the last…
Spain’s golden age — with a silver lining
As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied…
The war on drugs is stupid and counter-productive
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Books & arts
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Steyin’ alive
What are the odds that one of the world’s best political commentators happens to be an expert on the songs…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
The constant inconstancy that made Italians yearn for fascism
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and other characters to make you cry with laughter
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
The harsh, lonely lives of Kenya’s astonishingly gifted runners
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their…
The Outsider — from the viewpoint of the victim’s family
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
The best Jeeves and Wooster novel Saul Bellow never wrote
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
