Books
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,…
A hint of the numinous
Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make…
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,…
Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens
The post Title Stories: ‘Sketches by Boz’ by Charles Dickens appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Values
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
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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…
Homage to Simenon
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.
Shaping divinity to our ends
It slips so easily off the tongue. In fact, it’s a modern mantra. ‘Religion causes all the wars.’ Karen Armstrong…
Title Stories: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S.Eliot
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Not a foot wrong
Around 1960, I went to work with the literary staff of The Spectator, where I was followed, in a later…
England’s golden boy
Nothing illustrates the transformation in the working lives of professional footballers since the end of the maximum wage better than…
Poems from Going for a Song
An Anthology of Poems about Antiques, compiled and introduced by Bevis Hillier
The bitter Snows of yesteryear
This book charts the rise and fall of one of the strangest power couples of modern times. The senior partner…
An intellectual in intelligence
Shortly after the war began in September 1939, the branch of the intelligence services called MI8, or the Radio Security…
All dressed up – and skirting the subject
At the time it was all too easy to get sucked in by the hype. In 2013, Grayson Perry was…
Ack-ack guns on the Heath
The rise of the ‘misery memoir’ describing abusive childhoods, followed by the I-was-a-teenage-druggie-alkie-gangbanger-tick-as-appropriate memoir, pushed into the shadows an older…
And one more for the road
From Two More Pints by Roddy Doyle (Cape, £7.99, pp. 114, ISBN 9780224101899).
Talking pictures
Beaton was the great inventor. Apart from inventing not only himself but his look, his voice, his persona and a…
