Books
Title Stories: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri
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Stale, male and beyond the pale
This has all the appearance of a book invented by a publisher. Two years ago W. Sydney Robinson published an…
All that the British countryside has to offer
The Yale Center for British Art holds the largest collection of British art outside the UK. An impressive collection it…
Looking on the bright side
If Vincent Poklewski Koziell has really drunk as much as he claims in this book I doubt he would be…
Back in the mists of time
Most crime novels offer a curious kind of escape, to places that jag the nerves and worry the mind. Their…
Never say die
Winston Churchill once said of politics that it’s ‘almost as exciting as war and quite as dangerous. In war you…
The poetry of pottery
For Edmund de Waal a ceramic pot has a ‘real life’ that goes beyond functionalism.This handsome book (designed by Atelier…
Books and arts
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Battered and beaten down
It’s surely a fancy, the conviction that my first memory of newspapering came as a three-year-old, but I swear the…
Title Stories: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri
The post Title Stories: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Title Stories: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
The rhythm of life
Sam Leith finds much to like in a companion to musical films, and concludes that they matter very much – to the author anyway
An insider’s view
When Margot Asquith’s name crops up these days, it is usually in a retelling of the story about her meeting…
Home truths
There were several times when reading A Dog’s Life that I felt as if I’d fallen into a time warp.…
Viva España
‘Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma and who strangled Atahualpa.’ Macaulay, anticipating Gove, was complaining that the schoolboys by contrast…
For the love of Cornwall
Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the…
Now you see it…
John Gerard, a Jesuit priest immured in the Tower of London in 1597, and tortured by being hung from manacles…
A bounder par excellence
In his time, Gerald Hamilton (1890–1970) was an almost legendary figure, but he is now remembered — if at all…
From Russia with love
Nadezhda Alexandrovna Lokhvitskaya was a literary celebrity in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg. She chose the pen-name ‘Teffi’ because it was androgynous,…
Books and arts
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Unfair and unbalanced
The thesis of this book is that there is something wrong with politics in Australia. Bryant is right, but not…
Goodbye to all that
In the latest – and best – of the books on the end of the USSR, Victor Sebestyen finds that the only good thing about the Soviet empire was the manner of its passing
Home sweet home
‘Phlogiston’ is an interesting, if obsolete, word. Of Greek origin, it referred to the ‘fire-making’ quality thought to be present…
Extra-ordinary
A calculated ordinariness unites the protagonists in Graham Swift’s new collection of short stories. In each of these mini fictions,…
Don’t do as I do
Over the past 12 months, I’ve proposed to my girlfriend, moved house, got married, and become a father. The most…
