Books
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
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Emmanuel Carrère: a poet and psychopath doing his best to further destabilise Ukraine
If Eduard Limonov, the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s utterly engrossing biographical ‘novel’, hadn’t invented himself, Carrère would have had to…
Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Is there anything new left in gardening books?
‘Whither the novel’ was a great dinner party topic in the 1960s. It is a question less aired these days,…
Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
God, aliens and a novel with a mission
They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God.…
Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book
Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…
It’s the Stupid, stupid
Ironic Capitalisation of That Which You Do Not Like is apparently A Thing. You’ll forgive me for employing this Irritating…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
A choice of humorous books
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
The post Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
A choice of humorous books
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Paul Johnson on Henry Kissinger, Susan Hill on David Walliams, Julie Burchill on Julie Burchill: Spectator books of the year
Plus choices from Mark Amory, A.N. Wilson, Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Roger Lewis, Jonathan Mirsky, Jeremy Clarke, Stephen Walsh, Ferdinand Mount, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Wynn Wheldon, Stephen Bayley, Jonathan Rugman, Alan Judd, Patrick Marnham, Richard Davenport-Hines, Michela Wrong, Byron Rogers, Sofka Zinovieff and Andrew Taylor
From water-dwelling sponges to face-eating hyenas: the whole of life is in this book
‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose…
Wendy Cope on hating school, meeting Billy Graham and enduring Freudian analysis
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
This autumn's crime fiction visits the Isle of Man and enters the Big Brother house
Phil Rickman isn’t unusual among crime writers for mingling supernatural elements with earthly crimes. What makes him different is his…
The king who blamed everything that went wrong on God
Geoffrey Parker is a product of Nottingham and Christ’s College Cambridge, and I think was once a pupil of the…
Nicky Haslam on sharing a lover with Elsa Schiaparelli and the endearing punk of Vivienne Westwood
A comet streaked into France in the 1930s, its fallout sending the staid echelons of haute couture into a tailspin.…
A book about the ordinary nothings that, in the end, are everything
We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know.…
I guarded Rudolf Hess
I had the misfortune to meet Lord Richards on probably the darkest day of his 42 years in the military.…
Title Stories: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
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