Books
Unreliable Narrator
If a clock can be a household’s totem then we remain hopeful ours will show us an accurate blue moon…
Riddles in the sand
Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £20.00. Tel: 08430 600033
Muskets v. the Highland charge
What a wretched lot the Stuarts were, the later ones especially, the males at least. James II fled England without…
From surgeon’s scrubs to patient’s gown
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,…
We are not all in this together
Not so long ago I stumbled into a little pop-up in Hoxton: a delightful tearoom hardly bigger than a walk-in…
The making of a legend
For one week in July 2010, the aspiring spree killer Raoul Moat was the only news. ‘Aspiring’ because he didn’t…
Humboldt’s gift
The Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt was once the most famous man in Europe bar Napoleon. And if you judge…
Escaping the Slough of despond
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…
No end to the Final Solution
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…
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,…
Autocracy tempered by strangulation
It’s hard to tell at times who came off worst in Romanov Russia — the tsar or his subjects, says Adam Zamoyski
Not so happy valley
Simon Barnes opens with a presumably true idea, that we are all in search of our own versions of paradise…
Poverty + anarchy + drug dollars = Mexico
You may not have heard of the Maras. Or Barrio 18. Or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or the Zatas,…
Sharing the Dog
The Dog share didn’t work out well in the end. For a start, Dog — no mean manipulator — cadged…
A country in crisis
Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with…
Rewriting the merchant’s tale
Howard Jacobson’s novelistic riff on The Merchant of Venice for the Hogarth Shakespeare project turns, unsurprisingly, on what makes some…
