Books
Forewarned is not forearmed
When Ray Bradbury was asked if his dystopian vision in Fahrenheit 451 would become a reality, he replied: ‘I don’t…
A mad racket
There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished…
Travels in time and space
It’s a bold writer who confronts a major historical moment such as a pandemic before it’s over, but Emily St.…
Truth in small matters
‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that…
Chariot on fire
Eighty years ago, just after midnight on 28 March 1942, the British destroyer HMS Campbeltown crept up the estuary of…
An international civil war
Sara Wheeler describes the appalling brutality of the Russian Revolution and its far-reaching aftermath
Atomic reading
So you think you know the story of Britain’s notorious atomic tests in Australia? In that respect, the name of…
Dreaming of Jerusalem
Justin Marozzi on the troubled history of a small, much-coveted country
Desperate fools
Almost half of the terrorists hadn’t even turned up. Still, on the night of 23 February 1820, 25 men, including…
Fresh air and fanaticism
The village of Oberstdorf lies in the Bavarian Alps, geographically remote but, as this gripping book demonstrates, deeply etched by…
Linguistic games
David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…
The slow horses gather pace
Reviewers who make fancy claims for genre novels tend to sound like needy show-offs or hard-of-thinking dolts. So be it:…
To the back of beyond
What does home mean? Where your dead are buried, as Zulus believe? Or where you left your heart, as a…
The threat from within
According to Vladimir Putin, liberalism is an ‘obsolete’ doctrine, a worn-out political philosophy no longer fit for purpose. In this…
Glaswegian waif
Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize,…
Messy family business
Cressida Connolly’s new novel begins with a couple of endings. It’s spring 1855, and on the battlefields of the Crimea…
Moonlit escapades
The Perfect Golden Circle is ostensibly about male friendship. Two men, flotsam of the 1980s – Calvert, a Falklands veteran,…
Who’s blinded by class and imperial prejudices?
Tariq Ali, the Marxist writer and activist, believes that a ‘Churchill cult’ is ‘drowning all serious debate’ about the wartime…
All talk and no trousers
Attacks on British elitism usually talk about Oxbridge, but Simon Kuper argues that it is specifically Oxford that is the…
A dangerous balancing act
Thomas Cromwell’s biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch once told me that my father’s family, the Dormers, had been servants of the great…
A democracy ruled by dynasts
The Philippines is the odd man out in Asia, a predominantly Catholic country colonised first by Spain, then the United…
A prickly customer
In October 1897, the grandees of the Royal Horticultural Society gathered to bestow their highest award, the Victoria Medal of…
The right not to bear arms
As I’ve occasionally come to think is the case with The Spectator, this book is perhaps best begun at the…
A visit from Neanderthals
This is the kind of novel that will be discussed jubilantly in the book clubs of places like Lib Dem…
A true bohemian
Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller
