Books
… and sense and sensibility
Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books…
Fleeing Mother Russia
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
The Feelgood factor
When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who…
The feast before the famine
If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was…
Books and arts opener
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Throned on her hundred isles
It took the madness of genius to build such a wonderful impossibility. Patrick Marnham reviews a delightful new literary guide to Venice
The dog it was that died
Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the…
The grit in the oyster
Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George…
One day, two lonely people
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
Rewriting holy writ
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
Goodbye to all that
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
The bane of Albania
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
Everyone’s favourite dinosaur
Tyrannosaurus rex is the greatest celebrity of all time. The 68–66 million-year-old carnivore is far older than any actor or…
Nothing quite adds up
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
Black mischief among the Medicis
The life – and violent death – of a very unusual Renaissance prince has Alex von Tunzelmann enthralled
The American dream goes bust
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
All is not lost
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
A clash of two cultures
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…
Chance would be a fine thing
If I prang your car, we can swap insurance details. In the past, it would have been necessary for you…
Gods and monsters
Although Nepal’s earthquake last April visited our television screens with images of seismic devastation, the disaster has probably had little…
Crossing continents
Mysteries abound here — enigmas of identity and betrayal, long-buried secret transactions leading to quests — for a lost child,…
Women and song
Just a few weeks ago, Germany’s VAN magazine published an interview with the composer Olga Neuwirth. In it she describes…
Escape from the hood
The author of the bestseller Between the World and Me and recipient of a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ last year, Ta-Nehisi…
Running the triple crown
The story of the Czechoslovak runner Emil Zátopek is a tale from athletics’ age of innocence. Without the aid of…
Who’s who and what’s what
Asked to name a reference book, you may well choose the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. But…
