Books
More brickbats from the old buffer
After Dear Lupin and Dear Lumpy, here’s a slightly more prosaically titled collection of letters from Roger Mortimer, longtime racing…
A lovable failure
Sebastian Barry’s new novel opens with a bang, as a German torpedo hits a supply ship bound for the Gold…
Booked for murder
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Shadows on the wall
‘Take away, utterly extinct and destroy all shrines … pictures, paintings and all other monuments of feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry…
A way with the stars
Many people write, or at least used to write, fan letters to their film favourites. Usually all they received in…
Books and arts
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Letting go
We are not, by our nature, a militaristic people, and it is significant that our most well-known military venture was…
Power to the people
Alan Johnson cannot accept that the best days of the British working class are over
Scones and Bloomsberries for tea
I have to declare an interest: as a scion of the Bloomsbury Group, I was naturally brought up on their…
Jokes? Prayers? Fables?
One of these is by Lydia Davis, acclaimed American writer. One is not. They are whole pieces, by the way,…
An expert castle-squatter
When Nick Hunt first read Patrick Leigh Fermor’s account of his youthful trudge across Europe in A Time of Gifts…
A stranger in his own land
Who or what was Michael Oakeshott? How many of our fellow citizens — how many even of the readers of…
Noble cities of the dead
The first visitor to take a break on the Bay of Naples was Hercules. He had just defeated some rebellious…
A powerful inspiration
Everyone knows about the Spanish civil war, first battlefield in the struggle that broke out in 1936 and ended nine…
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
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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…
