Books
An invisibility cloak? You might just be able to see it on the horizon...
The best books by good writers — and Philip Ball is a very good writer indeed — are sometimes the…
Falling in love with birds of prey
Is it the feathers that do the trick? The severely truculent expressions on their faces? Or is it their ancient…
The Jane Austen of Brazil
When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951, she expected to spend two weeks there and ended…
Two Roads
There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the…
Reynolds produced some of the finest portraits of the 18th century – and a few of the silliest
On Monday 21 April 1760 Joshua Reynolds had a busy day. Through the morning and the afternoon he had a…
Soviet greyness, literary mediocrity and hot dates
Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare…
Interviews with the great, the good, the less great and the really quite bad
The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to…
Title Stories: A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Guilt trip
If you had to pick one emotion to characterise Australia’s attitude towards East Timor, it would be guilt. We are…
Two Roads
There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the…
Title Stories: A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
The post Title Stories: A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Two Roads
There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the…
Title Stories: A Clockwork Orange By Anthony Burgess
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Kaiser Wilhelm's guide to ruining a country
The life of Kaiser Wilhelm II is also a guide to how to ruin a country, says Philip Mansel
The robber baron who 'bought judges as other men buy food’
The robber barons of the gilded age, at the turn of the 20th century, were the most ruthless accumulators of…
The mad, bad and sad life of Dusty Springfield
Call me a crazy old physiognomist, but my theory is that you can always spot a lesbian by her big…
Like Birdsong – only cheerful
It is difficult to know whether Clive Aslet intended a comparison between his debut novel, The Birdcage, set in Salonica…
The threat from Russia’s spies has only increased since the fall of Communism
‘No, we must go our own way,’ said Lenin. The whole world knows him as Vladimir, while he was in…
Potato prints, paintings and the Soviet Union: the real Miss Jean Brodie
During the second world war, when not only food, but paper and artists’ materials were scarce, Peggy Angus made a…
Creepy, dizzying and dark: a choice of recent crime fiction
Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity…
Banned – and booming: the strange world of Chinese golf
I was in Shanghai interviewing a Chinese film director and an actor. We were discussing government censorship. How did anyone…
Title Stories: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Murakami drops magic for realism in this tale of a lonely Tokyo engineer
When Haruki Murakami — Japan’s most successful novelist at home and abroad — was interviewed by the Paris Review in…
Rosa Wedding Day
More than a thousand buds have arrived in the garden. Yesterday I looked and there were none. Tangled into a…
