Half blind to the world
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
My Icelandic holiday with Kevin and Perry
I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like…
A very Irish tragedy
Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…
Solution to 2563: Areas for development
As suggested by 11 across, the other unclued lights were anagrams of capital cities: 23A Nairobi, 25A Nassau, 29A Lima,…
Puzzle no. 713
White to play and mate in two. Composed by Henri Rinck, La Strategie, 1892. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk…
The price of courage
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
Riding the feedless horse
Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…
Fleshing out family history
DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. Everyone was divine at a very jolly lunch I attended in the Cotswolds with the exception of one person,…
Dark days in Hollywood
Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
‘You can’t have your cake and eat it’
As the leadership contest hots up, Charles Moore and Rishi Sunak sit down for a chat
A courtroom giant
Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…
Low life
In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in…
High life
I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilised tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so…
Wild life
Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at…
Real life
‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put…
The secret sharers
In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…
Bridge
The bridge world is coming back to life with a bang. The World Championships were held (live) in March, the…
Voices of the veld
Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…
Mystic multitudes
Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…
Alfred the Great
Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint
