Books
Title Stories: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain
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Nabokov’s love letters are some of the most rapturous ever written
Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher
Head Beaters
Ah, democracy. The informed will of the majority. If only the practice was as simple as the theory. When it…
This former head of the Metropolitan finds Rembrandt boring
Surely only a double-act of the stature of Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from…
Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
Paul Merton’s is the most boastful autobiography in years
Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At…
Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens
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Yotam Ottolenghi: the Saatchi brothers of vegetable PR
It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of…
Boy, can Alan Johnson write
Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made…
What’s that I hear? Francis Fukuyama back-pedalling frantically
The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely…
Rowan Williams has been reading too much Wittgenstein
It used to seem rather obvious that the world was full of evidence for God. These days, theologians no longer…
I’m disappointed this director didn’t plunge the knife into Dustin Hoffman
At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from…
Passion, authority and the odd mini-rant: Scruton’s conservative vision
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about killing Thatcher is funny. Honest
Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make…
Books and arts
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Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens
The post Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Confused, unbalanced, brilliant: the Blanche Dubois of Tennessee Williams biographies
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
Rebellion without a cause: Peter Ackroyd's curious Civil War
How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s…
A salute to Georges Simenon
The full series of the Maigret novels, together with some of the romans durs, are being republished by Penguin Classics at a rate of one per month. Patrick Marnham salutes a magnificent long-term project.
Religion does not poison everything - everything poisons religion
It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong…
Title Stories: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S.Eliot
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