Books
Answers to Spot the Shakespearean Character quiz
1. Oberon (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hamlet (Hamlet) 3. Cordelia (King Lear) 4. Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing) 5.…
Christmas quiz – the answers
You don’t say 1. President Donald Trump, in a tweet 2. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, in…
Edward Gorey: master of the macabre
‘A is for Amy who fell down the stairs/ B is for Basil, assaulted by bears…’ The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an…
Elizabeth II: Queen of tact and diplomacy
In her 66 years on the throne the Queen has represented Britain on official visits to at least 126 countries…
Shades of Lord Lucan: A Double Life, by Flynn Berry, reviewed
A young girl finds the body of her nanny, brutally murdered, and the barely moving form of her mother, a…
Family favourites: children’s books for Christmas reviewed
There’s no shortage of magical rings in the children’s canon, the sort of things that usefully make you invisible or…
The scandalous swamp of Indian politics
Picture India in 1991. You need to make several trips to Delhi and wait three years to import a computer.…
The gambler and the hooker: Awful Beauty, by Andrei Navrozov, reviewed
This book — the title is from Pasternak —is billed as ‘literary fiction’. The narrator, a Russian gambler and drinker…
Tell them of Battles, Kings and Elephants, by Mathias Enard, reviewed
Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn,…
A real-life Bluebeard: on the track of France’s most notorious serial killer
From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely…
What links fairy tales, Karl Marx, Anne Frank and St Augustine?
Its Booker-longlist nomination meant that Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina (Granta, £16.99) was the comic that everyone has heard of this year,…
Is Lionel Messi the greatest footballer of all time?
If you don’t know who Lionel Messi is you won’t enjoy this book much. If you do, you probably will.…
Chains and planes: Turbulence, by David Szalay, reviewed
In the opening pages of Turbulence, a woman in her seventies, who is visiting her sick son in Notting Hill,…
Michelle Obama: ‘I was happy that Barack’s career came first’
‘To me, he was sort of like a unicorn,’ writes Mrs Obama, looking back on her courtship days with Barack.…
Will it be kid pie this Christmas?
A long and messy business is how the chef Rowley Leigh explains his preferred way of eating. Picking at a…
![The China-Russia East Route pipeline under construction in 2017. At 3,968 km in length, it is designed to carry 38 billion cubic metres of natural gas from Russia’s Far East to Shanghai. [Getty]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/11/Pipeline.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
China’s power grab steps up apace
Five years ago President Xi Jinping gave a speech in Kazakhstan, launching the ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’, a wildly ambitious…
Bertie takes on the Black Shorts: Jeeves and the King of Clubs, by Ben Schott, reviewed
In 2016, inspired by reports that Donald Trump’s butler had recommended the assassination of Barack Obama, Ben Schott wrote a…
The peculiar allure of the Pyrenees
On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married…
Couldn’t artists let one read when sitting for them?
The 20th-century painter Balthus once suggested that the author of a book about him began with the words: ‘Balthus is…
The I’s have it: the latest debut novels reviewed
The large number of novels written in the first person would suggest it’s an easy voice to pull off: that…
![The Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. [Getty]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/11/The_Earl_of_Southampton.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
Shakespeare as political pamphleteer
Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece is a puzzling and often terrible poem. Lucrece, the devout wife of Collatine, is raped by…
Rows backstage at the National Theatre
It is, proclaimed Charles Wyndham in 1908, ‘an institution alien to the spirit of our nation’. The alien having long…
![Marie Colvin, a year before her death. [Rex Features]](https://spectatorau.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/11/Marie_Colvin.jpg?auto=compress,enhance,format&crop=faces,entropy,edges&fit=crop&w=410&h=275)
For Marie Colvin, mortal danger was what made life worth living
When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed…
Books of the year – part two
Daniel Swift I feel as though I came late to the Sarah Moss party. Nobody told me she was this…
Saul Bellow: love the work, if not the man
Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was…
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