Books
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…
Marred entertainment
It’s September 2017, and our still apparently United Kingdom is in the throes of a referendum campaign. The wise, charming,…
Our most popular (and hardworking) living artist
The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter…
Mynheer Wouwermans
From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past…
Keep the Booker British
Americans don’t need the cachet of our most prestigious literary prize – but we do, says Matthew Walther
Books and arts
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And one more for the road
9-12-12— See the spacer died. —Wha’ spacer? —The Sky at Night fella. —Bobby Moore. —Patrick Moore. —That’s him, yeah. Did…
Homage to Simenon
One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army…
Mynheer Wouwermans
From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past…
Title Stories: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S.Eliot
The post Title Stories: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S.Eliot appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…
And one more for the road
9-12-12— See the spacer died. —Wha’ spacer? —The Sky at Night fella. —Bobby Moore. —Patrick Moore. —That’s him, yeah. Did…
Homage to Simenon
One hundred years ago an 11-year-old boy called Georges Simenon was getting accustomed to the presence of the German army…
Mynheer Wouwermans
From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past…
Title Stories: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S.Eliot
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
High rises and dashed hopes
The only thing really swinging in early Sixties Britain, says Sam Leith, was the wrecking-ball
