Books
The Afterlives of the Anarchists
Those staples in their foursquare silver strips Stacked upwards like some brutalist Manhattan office block Were teased apart by fingertips…
Love letters for the world
Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher
Head Beaters
Ah, democracy. The informed will of the majority. If only the practice was as simple as the theory. When it…
Looking and listening
Surely only a double-act of the stature of Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from…
Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
Boastful and bored
Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At…
Drama in the mouth
It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of…
I believe in yesterday
Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made…
The political prophet
The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely…
The wisdom of language
It used to seem rather obvious that the world was full of evidence for God. These days, theologians no longer…
Director’s cut
At the age of 75, the theatre director Michael Rudman has got around to his memoirs, their title taken from…
Home is where his heart is
Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…
Books and arts
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Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
Values
The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…
A Blanche Dubois of a book
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
An old classic in a new light
Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…
Shades of the classroom
How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s…

























