Books
A bad novel on the way to a good one
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Lovely house of ill repute
Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust…
Reality games
The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator,…
The rich are a different species
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
Mission near impossible
Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June…
One événement after another
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…
Anyone for ice tennis?
Scholarship for its own sake has rather gone out of fashion, although I’m sure Spectator readers would be the last…
Stately Spanish galleons with gold moidores
As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied…
The murderous gangs who run the world
Rosalio Reta was 13 years old when recruited by a Mexican drug cartel. He was given a loyalty test —…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Books & arts
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Steyin’ alive
What are the odds that one of the world’s best political commentators happens to be an expert on the songs…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Growing Up
This morning, as I commuted through Hendon Central, I remembered you telling me you saw that day’s newspaper there on…
Double thinking, double lives
Jan Morris on the inconsistency and paradox that has characterised Italian thought over the centuries — and the desperate search for certainty
Between duty and desire
Coup de Foudre has a line from Antony and Cleopatra as its epigraph: ‘Some innocents ’scape not the thunderbolt.’ In…
Running out of time
Two Hours is a kind of Hoop Dreams for runners. Ed Caesar follows a handful of Kenyan marathoners, tracks their…
Bringing Camus to book
In 1975 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, in a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, identified Joseph Conrad’s Heart of…
An American Wodehouse
Wake Up, Sir! is the latest novel by the American humourist Jonathan Ames; the book first appeared in the States…
The glory that was Greece
Financial crises are nothing new in Greece. Back in 354 BC, at a time when Frankfurt was still a swamp,…
Epitaph for a Star
A chance in a million: he was perfectly cast In the role of his own life, though he almost flipped…
The song of the sirens
The first mermaid we meet in this intriguing, gorgeously produced book is spray-painted in scarlet on a wall in Madrid,…
Between Heaven and ‘L’
A.N. Wilson has had a tempestuous journey on the sea of faith. His first port of call was St Stephen’s…
Master of vitriol
‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…
When the journey, not the arrival, mattered
Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding.…
