Books
When boxing ruled the world
The early 1970s was a good time for heavyweight boxing. Indeed, it was probably the last truly great age for…
Floating bodies, seeing hands, rippling skies - is Jerry Uelsmann’s photomontage a tragic dead-end?
An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel…
In love with the lodger
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…
Exactly how much fun was it being an impoverished artist in Paris?
What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds…
Kafka goes to Dubai
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…
In defence of the Jacobins
The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a…
Books and arts
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Thought bubbles
It is not really a surprise that political parties produce a certain number of oddballs; the scary thing is that…
Like a Prayer
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like…
Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The post Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion…
Like a Prayer
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like…
Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Books and arts
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The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side's in charge...
For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is…
80 sq yds per gallon
Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…
Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
A novel that will make you want to call social services
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
A Hello! magazine history of Venice
When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…
Sorbet with Rimbaud
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
Ian Fleming: cruel? Selfish? Misogynistic? Nonsense, says his step-daughter
Between the brothers Peter and Ian Fleming, Fionn Morgan wonders who was the better writer and who the better man
Stalin's Spanish bezzie
During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the…
Title Stories: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
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The colonel and the commander
7 August 1964 4 Old Mitre Court, EC4 Darling Fifi, A thousand thanks for your sweet letter & for Heaven’s…
80 sq yds per gallon
Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…
