Books
The little dictator
No actual birth certificate for Charles Spencer Chaplin has ever been found. The actor himself drew a blank when he…
Don’t do as I do, do as I say
A-Huff’s career has been remarkable for the contrast between hard-headed social advancement (‘the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus’) and…
Don Quixote of Kaszubia
In 1993, John Borrell, a longtime foreign correspondent with no permanent home, decided to abandon journalism. Tired of writing about…
The fag-end rescued from the bin
Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For…
Officers, no gentlemen
In March 1915 the 27th Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, with an already distinguished political career behind him, took the…
Culture and horticulture
Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens is a beautiful book. Lovers of early 20th-century British art will find it hard to stop…
Another secret garden
Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955, focuses on the roaming children — the ‘sparrows’ — of a shabby street in bomb-torn London. When ten-year-old Lovejoy Mason finds a packet of cornflower seeds and decides to create an ‘Italian’ garden hidden in a rubble-strewn churchyard, the consequences are life-changing for all who become involved. Below is the foreword to a recent reissue of the novel (Virago Modern Classics, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.49).
In Winwick Churchyard
The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in…
Books and arts
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
A sober critic
Let’s get one thing straight: gullibility is not a virtue. This simple principle appears to be difficult to grasp for…
Another secret garden
I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult…
In Winwick Churchyard
The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in…
Another secret garden
I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult…
In Winwick Churchyard
The gravestones are laughing. They tilt at each other’s shoulders, droll tears of lichen blotching their honourable faces. Seated in…
The lesser evil
The argument that mankind’s innate violence can only be contained by force of arms may make for a neat paradox, but it fails to convince David Crane
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
Far from pitch-perfect
It isn’t just the elk, either. Also bringing proceedings to a halt in this wonderful anthology are camels (Bahrain), cows…
Between the broad and the high
Oriel was only the fifth college to be founded in Oxford, in 1326. Although it has gone through periods of…
All the gossip from London and Paris
Sir Brian Unwin leads off with some decidedly questionable assertions. He wonders why the first of his two subjects, the…
Blue-sky thinking
‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’…
Garbo’s mystique
With two new biographies of Kim Philby out, an espionage drama by Sir David Hare on BBC2, and the recent…
April
Spring again But from where no telling Sweet as the spring That went before…
The class that got left behind
In the 2010 general election, Ukip gained nearly a million votes — over 3 per cent — three times as…
Bark and no bite
With so much Nordic noir around, it’s a relief to return to the granddaddy of them all, the hard-boiled private…
Forever on the march
On a recent weekend I was thinking of taking my sons to downtown Istanbul to do some bazaar browsing. ‘Bad…
