Books
Forlorn Hope
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…
We don’t have words for this
Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
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Portrait of a romantic psychopath
If Eduard Limonov, the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s utterly engrossing biographical ‘novel’, hadn’t invented himself, Carrère would have had to…
Yearning for Knole
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
A choice of gardening books
‘Whither the novel’ was a great dinner party topic in the 1960s. It is a question less aired these days,…
Everything is merde
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
The man who fell from Earth
They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God.…
A Latin American shaggy-dog story
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
The art of design
Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…
It’s the Stupid, stupid
Ironic Capitalisation of That Which You Do Not Like is apparently A Thing. You’ll forgive me for employing this Irritating…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
A choice of humorous books
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
The post Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
A choice of humorous books
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Books of the Year
Plus choices from Mark Amory, A.N. Wilson, Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Roger Lewis, Jonathan Mirsky, Jeremy Clarke, Stephen Walsh, Ferdinand Mount, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Wynn Wheldon, Stephen Bayley, Jonathan Rugman, Alan Judd, Patrick Marnham, Richard Davenport-Hines, Michela Wrong, Byron Rogers, Sofka Zinovieff and Andrew Taylor
The lion lies down with the worm
‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose…
The making of a poet
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
Recent crime fiction
Phil Rickman isn’t unusual among crime writers for mingling supernatural elements with earthly crimes. What makes him different is his…
The empire on which the sun never set
Geoffrey Parker is a product of Nottingham and Christ’s College Cambridge, and I think was once a pupil of the…
Shock and awe
A comet streaked into France in the 1930s, its fallout sending the staid echelons of haute couture into a tailspin.…
The ebb and flow of inner thought
We live in a world in which nuance is trampled on and cannot survive. Is that true? I don’t know.…
