Hills
As soon as you stop and rest you see more hills ahead, Great chains of hills to some improbable horizon.…
Mirror, mirror
Women tend to see themselves as less attractive than they are. Men seem to have the opposite problem
Iowa notebook
His opponents say that his campaign is just an extension of his reality TV career, but The Donald has a real ground game
Capitalism’s true enemies
The far left can’t win without the aid of callous, complacent conservatism
Don’t act white, act migrant
Underperforming British Caribbean schoolchildren could learn a lot from their African immigrant peers
In the sky with diamonds
But in The Universe in Your Hand, Christophe Galfard takes the reader by the hand to explain quarks, gluons, parallel universes and exploding suns in a friendly, avuncular-vicar manner
Monster of misrule
China’s economic miracle is deceptive: the country is still traumatised by the effects of the Cultural Revolution, according to Andrew G. Walder’s thought-provoking China Under Mao
Short and surreal
Tales of the desperate and surreal include hungry comic-book characters who resort to eating their own speech bubbles
Music for the masses
If only Peter Doggett’s vast survey had been a little less scholarly, we might all have been talking about Electric Shock — rather than just trying to lift it
These I have loved
In this wry reading diary, James revisits the books he has most loved — for poetry, history and swashbuckling adventure
The writing on the wall
In Circling the Square, the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson traces — through lightening character-sketches of Cairo life — how the Egyptian revolution ‘see-sawed between joy and death’
Hurricane Lolita
Among Robert Roper’s many surprising and original ideas in his account of Nabokov in America is that the novelist’s son Dmitri may have been the inspiration for Lolita
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
Common sense, moral vision — and the magic touch
Reading Tony Little’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education — full of insight, erudition, sympathy and common sense — is a valuable education in itself
Lust for life
![Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.’](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/pepys1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Leighton Pugh’s extraordinary feat is to read aloud the entire Diary — all 116 hours of it — and bring 17th-century London magnificently to life
The master returns
The visionary theatremaker’s return to Edinburgh after 20 years, with the autobiographical 887, marks a return to form
The greatest pianist you’ve never heard of
‘The greatest pianist you’ve never heard of’ seems fair: he may well be one of the greatest I’ve ever heard
French connection
The Pallant House Gallery’s excellent new show reveals Sickert in all his glory and contradiction
Northern lights
Reviews of The Coin-Operated Girl; The Man Called Monkhouse; John Lennon: In His Own Write; and When Blair had Bush and Bunga
Stravinsky’s ingenious toy
While a first-rate performance of The Rake’s Progress can’t disguise the fact that it’s just an ingenious toy, a misconceived Figaro remains unsinkable
Poldark porn
The Scandalous Lady W, a relentlessly 21st-century version of a great period scandal, spells out the social implications with a giant trowel
