Books

Title Stories: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain

2 October 2014 1:00 pm

The post Title Stories: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain appeared first on The Spectator. Got something…

The Afterlives of the Anarchists

2 October 2014 1:00 pm

Those staples in their foursquare silver strips  Stacked upwards like some brutalist   Manhattan office block  Were teased apart by fingertips…

Title Stories: The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M Cain

2 October 2014 1:00 pm

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Vladimir and Véra: in love for life

Love letters for the world

27 September 2014 9:00 am

Vladimir Nabokov was happily married for over 50 years and rarely apart from his wife. More’s the pity, discovers Philip Hensher

Head Beaters

27 September 2014 9:00 am

Ah, democracy. The informed will of the majority. If only the practice was as simple as the theory. When it…

In the dialogue in front of Raphael’s ‘Madonna della Sedia’, Martin Gayford takes the lead

Looking and listening

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Surely only a double-act of the stature of Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from…

Values

27 September 2014 8:00 am

The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…

Boastful and bored

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Has there ever been a nun or a priest who wasn’t a bent sadist? Because here we go again. At…

Title-Stories-Sketches-by-Boz-by-Charles-Dickens

Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens

27 September 2014 8:00 am

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Ottolenghi’s tomato and pomegranate salad

Drama in the mouth

27 September 2014 8:00 am

It would be a mistake to treat Plenty More, the new cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi, merely as a collection of…

Comforting domesticity: Alan Johnson with his stepdaughter Natalie and daughter Emma

I believe in yesterday

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Alan Johnson’s first volume of memoirs, This Boy, is still in the bestsellers’ list, but the Stakhanovite postman has made…

The political prophet

27 September 2014 8:00 am

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely…

The wisdom of language

27 September 2014 8:00 am

It used to seem rather obvious that the world was full of evidence for God. These days, theologians no longer…

A figure of envy for much of male Middle England: Michael Rudman, with Felicity Kendal

Director’s cut

27 September 2014 8:00 am

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

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Roger Scruton is that rarest of things: a first-rate philosopher who actually has a philosophy. Unfortunately at times for him,…

A hint of the numinous

27 September 2014 8:00 am

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make…

‘Blissfull Region 11.01.11’, by John Hoyland

Books and arts

27 September 2014 8:00 am

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Values

25 September 2014 1:00 pm

The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…

Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens

25 September 2014 1:00 pm

The post Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…

Values

25 September 2014 1:00 pm

The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount,…

Title-Stories-Sketches-by-Boz-by-Charles-Dickens

Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens

25 September 2014 1:00 pm

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

Tennessee Williams on the stage set of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)

A Blanche Dubois of a book

20 September 2014 9:00 am

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

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable…

Oliver Cromwell opening the coffin of Charles I, by Paul Delaroche

Shades of the classroom

20 September 2014 9:00 am

How our perceptions of 17th-century England are dominated by the convulsions of the two decades at its centre! Peter Ackroyd’s…

Georges Simenon aged 30 (left) and Jean Gabin (right) in the 1958 film Maigret Tend un Piège — to be shown as part of a season of Maigret films at the Barbican, London (4–26 October). For details visit www.barbican.org.uk.

Homage to Simenon

20 September 2014 9:00 am

The full series of the Maigret novels, together with some of the romans durs, are being republished by Penguin Classics at a rate of one per month. Patrick Marnham salutes a magnificent long-term project.