Women on the warpath
One thing that Covid lockdown made us appreciate was the importance of being outdoors. When we were finally allowed into…
Soused in bilge
The Fever Syndrome is a dramatised lecture set in a New York brownstone occupied by the super-brainy Myers family. The…
A Ukrainian’s notebook
Palm Sunday in Perugia. Umbrians were scuttling around with twigs and leaves, but I was in town to celebrate another…
The worst of friends
First the bad news: Nina Stibbe’s new novel does not feature Lizzie Vogel, the engaging narrator of the trilogy that…
2551: Madness
Unclued lights (including two of two words) suggest nine words (all in Chambers) starting with the same four-letter word that…
Colour in the gloom
Music and politics don’t mix, runs the platitude. Looks a bit tattered now, doesn’t it? For Soviet musicians, of course,…
Sound made visible
What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. A great friend is in a terrible state regarding a cat foisted on her by a close relation. She…
Something doesn’t add up
More exciting news arrives from Britain’s dimmest university, Durham, which is embarking on a programme to ‘decolonise’ mathematics. About time.…
My crowning achievement
It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later…
The Spectator’s Notes
The end of the Cold War was used by the victors to unite Germany. To balance this, Europhiles created a…
A festering wound
Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of…
Staring back at Suzon
In this arresting debut novel we follow 26-year-old Eve as she tries to come to terms with the loss of…
Law and orders
St. Petersburg University in Russia is (desperately?) inviting scholars worldwide to a conference in September celebrating Mikhail Speransky. It was…
Real life
The bank was having Transgender Visibility Day when I popped in to deposit some cash.The stressed-looking customers, meanwhile, seemed mostly…
Rishi Sunak’s political naivety
Before the war in Ukraine, ministers and Tory MPs believed a fixedpenalty notice for the Prime Minister would mean the…
The man who disappeared
In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…
Low life
After north Cornwall I came to the Test Valley, I think. That is what it says on the council vans…
A pure original
John Donne sounds like nobody else, and his poems invite us to feel that we might know him, says Daniel Swift
Worse verse
In Competition No. 3244, you were invited to submit a poem to mark St George’s Day that rivals in awfulness…
High life
The only good news, after the massacres in Ukraine, is that so many ugly behemoth super-yachts have been seized and…
‘Putin still has a lot left to lose’
Niall Ferguson and David Petraeus on Russia’s mistakes, Xi’s plans and the lessons of Iraq
