Books
Like a Prayer
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like…
Poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
What is going on?
Pity the poor art historian writing a survey of painters from Giotto to, say, Poussin. In order to produce a…
We shall fight them on the beaches…
Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private…
Lords of the ring
The early 1970s was a good time for heavyweight boxing. Indeed, it was probably the last truly great age for…
Layers of meaning
An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel…
In love with the lodger
Champion Hill, Camberwell, 1922. A mother and daughter, stripped of their menfolk by the Great War, struggle to make ends…
In the gutter, looking at the stars
What he really wanted, Picasso once remarked, was to live ‘like a pauper, but with plenty of money’. It sounds…
X and his complexes
‘X’ is in ‘the Situation’: Joseph O’Neill, author of the clever and superb Netherland, hereby lets us know that his…
Full of sound and fury
The French Revolution ushered in not only a revolution of rolling heads but of talking ones too. ‘Speech-making was a…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Thought bubbles
It is not really a surprise that political parties produce a certain number of oddballs; the scary thing is that…
Like a Prayer
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like…
Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
The post Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion…
Like a Prayer
The heat in the day-room can put you to sleep there’s a man reciting the days of the week like…
Title Stories: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
The paradigm of a poet
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
An aura of sovereignty
For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is…
80 sq yds per gallon
Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…
The Putney boy done good
The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…
The mother of all problems
Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…
That sinking feeling
When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…
Doing the Woburn Walk
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
