An English Chekhov: The Gathered Leaves at Park200 reviewed
Chekhov with an English accent. That’s how Andrew Keatley’s play, The Gathered Leaves, begins. The setting is a country house…
Fails to outshine the original: The Roses reviewed
The Roses is a remake of The War of the Roses (1989), the diabolically funny black bitter comedy that was…
Spectator Competition: Ad it up
For Competition 3414 you were invited to provide an extract from a well-known literary work rewritten to include appropriate product…
A revelation: Delius’s Mass of Life at the Proms reviewed
Regarding Frederick Delius, how do we stand? In the 1930s, Sir Henry Wood believed that Proms audiences much preferred Delius…
Dirty work: The Expansion Project, by Ben Pester, reviewed
A debut novel with echoes of Kafka, Flaubert and the office sitcom, this is a tale of one man’s days on the treadmill of life that is both poignant and disconcerting
No stone unturned: the art of communing with rocks
If a river can be considered a living thing, why not stones and rocks? They bear witness to thousands of years of history and have spoken to us long before the formation of language itself. We just need to learn to listen
The enduring miracle of human birth – a history
Everyone who has ever lived came out of a woman’s body – a fact even more extraordinary when narrow hips and large skulls mean the human form is hardly precision engineered for such a feat
Starry starry night: the return of the sleeper train
Slow travel is in vogue and with it the renaissance of the railways. And what better way to journey by night across borders in the company of strangers?
Clerical skulduggery on the far borders of 1830s Germany
The Barchester Chronicles it isn’t, but this short and lively account of one of history’s footnotes reminds us that the culture wars existed long before TikTok and Twitter
Christopher Marlowe, the spy who changed literature for ever
The 16th-century playwright led a violent, tempestuous and clandestine short life but alone among his contemporaries he speaks to us in a familiar way
Kamala doesn’t deserve Secret Service detail
I served nearly a decade on Secret Service protective details. That included guarding the lives of President Bush and Obama…
The Epping hotel ruling is a victory – and a defeat – for Labour
It wasn’t surprising that the Home Office chose to back an urgent appeal in the Epping hotel case. Not only…
Kyiv and Budapest are at war over Druzhba pipeline
Relations between Ukraine and Hungary have soured once again after Robert Brovdi, the Ukrainian drone commander of Hungarian descent, struck…
Flashback: Rayner hits out at tax avoidance
If there are two things Angela Rayner can’t stand, it’s Tories (previously labelled scum) and tax avoiders. So Tories avoiding…
Judge rules that asylum seekers can stay put in Epping hotel
Asylum seekers will be allowed to stay at the Bell Hotel in Epping after the Court of Appeal lifted a…
