The Spectator’s Notes
Regardless of one’s views on climate change, one should welcome the fact that Boris Johnson removed Claire Perry O’Neill from…
Terror is the toughest issue facing the Tories
A prisoner is released early and just days later attacks people. It then emerges that he was known to still…
The insanity of terrorism
Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded…
Does Evil really exist?
A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about…
You can’t own stories
Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan)…
From Enron to Airbus, can justice ever keep pace with corporate sin?
So farewell Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom, the long–distance phone operator that became America’s biggest-ever bankruptcy case in…
Monopoly
I’ve been playing a lot of Monopoly recently. My son got his first grown-up set for Christmas and, even after…
The heroine of the plains
Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different
The emperor’s new clothes
In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for…
The downside of mindfulness
Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which…
Obscure objects of desire
In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and…
School of hard knocks
Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the…
A masterpiece of neo-noir
In one of the most frequently quoted lines of post-war European cinema, a character in the 1976 Wim Wenders film…
Buns in the oven
Does a practical joke differ from a hoax? It could be a matter of scale. Anyone can deploy a whoopee…
Life on a tightrope
The journalist Deepa Anappara turns to crime with her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus,…
Truth, lies and dirty money
A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten…
A star that waxed and waned
The story of how Hugo Vickers eventually tracked down the former Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough is almost as fascinating…
Warts and all
Jan van Eyck changed the art of picture-making more fundamentally than anyone
who has ever lived, says Martin Gayford
