Books
The day of reckoning is nigh
I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since…
Life with old father William
This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…
Gothic mysteries
This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are…
Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
Books and arts opener
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Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
In the sky with diamonds
The beliefs of physicists are infinitely kookier than anything in the Bible, says Alexander Masters
Monster of misrule
Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in…
Short and surreal
‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection…
Music for the masses
As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though…
These I have loved
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
The writing on the wall
‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…
Hurricane Lolita
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nostalgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
Common sense, moral vision — and the magic touch
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education is Tony Little’s valedictory meditation on his profession, published on his retirement as headmaster…
![Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.’](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/pepys1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Lust for life
We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
Wholly German art
Philip Hensher admires an old-fashioned conductor who unashamedly favours the great German composers — and Wagner in particular
The lives of the artists — and other mysteries
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…
August
The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The…
Idolising Ida
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
Venerable father of English history
It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when…
Rio’s rococo genius
The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…
