True grit
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
Madness in Manhattan
Life has far more imagination than we do, says the epigraph from Truffaut that opens Salman Rushdie’s 12th novel —…
Redcoats and runaways
Much romantic nonsense has been written about the runaway slaves or Maroons of the West Indies. In 1970s Jamaica, during…
Swagger and squalor
This is a monumental but inevitably selective survey of all that occurred in Britain, for better or worse, in the…
Courting trouble
Desmond de Silva was born in the colony of Ceylon in the early months of the second world war, the…
Christianity triumphant – and destructive
In the late years of Empire, and early days of Christianity, there were monks who didn’t wash for fear of…
Looking back, losing bits
As Roddy Doyle’s 12th novel begins, Victor Forde, a washed-up writer, has returned to the part of Dublin where he…
The journey of Adam and Eve
Trying to reconcile a belief in the literal truth of the Bible with the facts of the world as we…
Sappho in America
We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…
Gorblimey trousers
Piles of black plastic rubbish sacks lie in the streets of Birmingham because, since the end of June, the dustmen…
Real life
Stefano and his boys got to work with gusto and within a few days the upstairs of my house started…
Australian letters
Spreading the word Sir: Yesterday, I left my copy of last week’s Speccie behind at the optometrist after an appointment.…
Brown study
What an amazing contrast. Here I am in Bayreuth, Bavaria, to see Richard Wagner’s monumental Ring Cycle, probably the greatest…
Simon Collins
Hate gets a bad rap these days. Children are taught that they mustn’t hate each other, divorcees are counselled not…
Our energy farce
What a mess! Australia has the world’s largest readily available supplies of coal, gas and uranium yet our power prices…
Can anyone unite the Tory tribes?
One of the reasons that coalition governments are so unusual in Britain is that both main parties are coalitions themselves.…
An orchestrated race storm
A fascinating story has emerged from a north-western leftie quadrant of the United States: the sacking of British conductor Matthew…
The Spectator’s notes
Apologies for my absence from this column. My editors kindly let me get on with the final volume of my…
Bridge
This summer was the longest I have gone without playing bridge since I began about 20 years ago. Not one…
Study in obsession
Genna Sosonko is a writer and grandmaster who straddles two great chess cultures, Holland and the USSR, his chosen and native…
No. 474
Black to play. This position is from Carlsen-Bu, Fidé World Cup, Tbilisi 2017. Can you spot Black’s winning coup? Answers…
Nut job
The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a…
Space odyssey
Rachel Whiteread is an indefatigable explorer of internal space. By turning humble items such as hot-water bottles and sinks inside…
