Books
My mad gay grandfather and me
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
From working-class heroes to Disney World mascots: the sad fate of the Chilean miners
On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour…
The Irony of Wislava Szymborska
In London, I remember the indignation. Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we…
How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions
There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is…
The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed
Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something…
The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
A woman who wears her homes like garments
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang…
Why everyone wants what Nora Ephron was having
I have come late to Nora Ephron — a little too late for her, anyway, as she died in 2012.…
Detective drama Dostoevsky-style
In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s,…
Why prefabs really were fab
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
When Irish nationalism meant sexual adventure
One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past,…
Ezra Pound – the fascist years
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
Tolstoy’s favourite novel is a guide to being idle
Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s…
Is it boring being the god of the sea?
Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink…
Title Stories: Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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Lazarus is back
Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, Kim Beazley, still quips that John Winston Howard is his nemesis. This does not…
The Irony of Wislava Szymborska
In London, I remember the indignation. Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we…
Title Stories: Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The post Title Stories: Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to…
The Irony of Wislava Szymborska
In London, I remember the indignation. Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we…
Title Stories: Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
How Hitler's dreams came true in 1946
In 1946, in the aftermath of a devastating war, the world seemed a very dark place indeed, says Sam Leith
An epic performance that brings a lost novelist back to life
Hugh Walpole, now almost forgotten, was a literary giant. Descended from the younger brother of the 18th-century prime minister Robert…
To be astonished by nature, look no further than Claxton
Mark Cocker is the naturalist writer of the moment, with birds his special subject. His previous book, Birds and People,…
Imagine Eastenders directed by David Lynch
Ghostly doings are afoot in Edwardian London. Choking fog rolls over the treacle- black Thames. Braziers cast eerie shadows in…
Flawed, unproductive and heroic: the real Ernest Shackleton
Polar explorers are often cast as mavericks, and this is hardly surprising. The profession requires a disdain for pseudo-orthodoxies and,…
