Books
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
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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.…
The soldier-diplomat incarnate
I had the misfortune to meet Lord Richards on probably the darkest day of his 42 years in the military.…
Title Stories: Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
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Unhappy in their own way
Misery loves company. Anyone who doubts this old adage should pop into their local bookshop, because besides celebrity chefs and…
Goodman’s Garden
Where did they all go? Thickets of love and pain rustle in a dry light and skeins of corvidae traipse…
Heads will roll
A severed head, argues Frances Larson in her sprightly new book, is ‘simultaneously a person and a thing… an apparently…
Europe in sixty languages
So Basque is an ergative language! Well, I never. I couldn’t have told you that a week ago. I even…
Surviving The Cut
The moment Waterloo Bridge was planned across the Thames, a new theatre to serve the transpontine coach trade was inevitable.…
Skulls and cross bones
Skulls, femurs, ribs, pelvises, piled on top of each other in a chaotic heap: this, Denise Inge discovered, was what…
Cry, the beloved country
By 1940 Irène Némirovsky, who had arrived in France at the age of 16 as a refugee from Kiev, had…
The first and last puzzle
One could have endless fun setting quiz questions about Georges Perec. Which French novelist had a scientific paper, ‘Experimental demonstration…
Books and arts
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