Vignettes of a bygone English childhood
Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan…
The horror of post-Brexit Britain: Perfidious Albion, by Sam Byers, reviewed
Edmundsbury, the fictional, sketchily rendered town in which the action of this novel takes place, is part of a social…
Queen Mary: stiff and cold, but no kleptomaniac
![The proud, lonely queen dressed up in Garter ribbon and diamonds for dinner at Sandringham every night, even when alone with the king [Getty Images]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/queenmary.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
The best royal biography ever written is probably James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. Published in 1959, only six years after the…
Why has V.S. Naipaul rejected the Trinidad of his birth?
Savi Naipaul Akal’s publishing house is named after the peepal tree, in whose shade Buddha is said to have achieved…
Shades of Rear Window: People in the Room, by Norah Lange, reviewed
A girl at a window, hidden behind curtains, watches three women in a dimly lit drawing room in the house…
Global Britain was built as a narco-empire
![The First Opium War: The East India Company’s Nemesis and other boats destroy the Chinese war junks in Anson Bay, 7 January 1841 [Bridgeman Art Library]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/opiumwars.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
China, wrote Adam Smith, is ‘one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
The artist who breathes Technicolour life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering…
Currentzis’s Beethoven asked us to listen with our bodies rather than our minds
Some conductors conduct from the fingers — think of Gergiev’s convulsive gestures, flickering up and down the keyboard of an…
Comedy is entirely unsuited to the ‘Edinburgh hour’
Edinburgh. Why do comics do it? We invariably lose money. Even if you don’t pay for your venue, the cost…
Did Ed Balls mean to make a documentary on the joys of Trump’s America?
The thing I most regret having failed ever to ask brave, haunted, wise Sean O’Callaghan when I last saw him…
Modernist architecture only worked for the wealthy
It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une…
If we offer Ian McKellan a peerage, will he promise not to inflict his King Lear on us again?
Gandalf, also known as Ian McKellen, has awarded himself another lap of honour by bringing King Lear back to London.…
Radio 4 brings back the dead
If proof were needed that radio will survive the onslaught of the new (or rather now not-so-new) digital technologies, albeit…
It will save some marriages – or end others: The Escape reviewed
Dominic Savage had an early start. In Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick’s sprawling take on Thackeray, he played a prepubescent…
Sailing past the charred eastern coast of Greece
On board S/Y Puritan I’m sailing off the charred eastern coast of Athens where so many died last week,…
Confessions of a cave-dweller continued
The cave house next to ours is let out to weekly renters. A green-eyed German with a ponytail came out…
The only guarantee I have is that there is no guaranteeing my guarantee
Beko. I always want to sing that song by Peter Gabriel from the movie about the South African freedom fighter…
The man who rode 2,300 winners
On a foggy November day in 1965 the young son of a Barbadian police chief was one of six contestants…
Bridge
It’s that time of year again — summer and its attendant holidays. No bridge for me for a month, unless…
Rice gambit
The recent successful revival of the musical Chess, by Sir Tim Rice and the men of Abba, featured some genuine extracts…
no. 517
Black to play. This position is from the classic game Réti-Alekhine, Baden Baden 1925. What was Black’s next move? It…
That’s chemistry
In Competition No. 3059 you were invited to supply a poem inspired by the periodic table. The writer and chemist…
2370: Problem XII
Fans of classic 12 will know that where ‘Q’ = ‘the number of’: Q26 x Q1D x (Q34 + [Q36D/5A…
to 2367: When pigs fly
The quotation ‘NEVER (1A), NEVER (35), NEVER (41), NEVER (7), NEVER (32)!’ is from King Lear (V.iii.310). Lear was the…
