Theresa May’s right: the police need radical reform. Here’s why
Maybe it's because they don't like us, either
The moral of Royal Mail: markets are capricious and bankers aren’t worth their fees
Plus: From golf courses back to farming in County Kerry
Single Mum
Scarborough 1939 Mum’s slipping on her see-through dress. Outside our council house a chauffered Rolls is waiting. It’s a beautiful…
Gone with the wind turbine
In cities, changes to the skyline are subject to careful planning. Not so here
Rise of the mayors
The power to effect real change may lie with dynamic city halls rather than ossified national governments
Book clubs
Everyone knows somebody who belongs to a book club. From informal gatherings of bookish friends in living rooms and cafés…
Power to the people
A review of Selina Todd’s ‘The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class, 1910–2010’. The working class may disappoint radicals, says Alan Johnson, but that doesn't mean their best days are over
Scones and Bloomsberries for tea
A review of Jan Ondaatje Rolls’ ‘The Bloomsbury Cookbook: Recipes for Life, Love and Art’. How to make Dora Carrington’s nectar of cowslip wine, Vanessa Bells’s scones or William Cobbett’s loaf
Jokes? Prayers? Fables?
A review of Lydia Davis’ ‘Can’t and Won’t’. Susan Hill finds flashes of genius in Davis’ latest collection of short stories but she’s not sure everyone will
An expert castle-squatter
A review of Nick Hunt’s ‘Walking the Woods and the Water’. Hunt retraces the footsteps of Patrick Leigh Fermor across the suburban wastelands of Holland to the woods of Transylvania
A stranger in his own land
A review of Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Selected Writings, Vol VI: Notebooks, 1922-86’. Other nations know how to honour their philosophers – and this was a major philosopher
Noble cities of the dead
A review of Ingrid D. Rowland’s ‘From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town’. The dead city is still capable of changing lives – Ingrid Rowland proves it
A powerful inspiration
A review of Jeremy Treglown’s Franco’s ‘Crypt: Spanish Culture and Memory Since 1936’. A lot of the great art and film made under Franco’s regime has been unfairly tainted by association
The little dictator
A review of Peter Ackroyd’s Charlie Chaplin. His films may have been all sweetness and light – but Chaplin's ego had few limits
Don’t do as I do, do as I say
A review of Arianna Huffington’s ‘Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life’. You've seen the advice a thousand times. But the person giving it is something else...
Don Quixote of Kaszubia
A review of John Borrell’s ‘The White Lake’. An escape to the country for Borrell turned out to be a struggle for the soul of Poland
The fag-end rescued from the bin
A review of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Echo’s Bones’. Considered too Beckettian for 1933, this recovered short-story is an allusive riot
Officers, no gentlemen
A review of Anthony Seldon and David Walsh’s ‘Public Schools and the Great War’ and ‘Private Lord Crawford’s Great War Diaries’. Crawford’s entries undermine Seldon and Walsh’s rose-tinted view of public school conscripts
Culture and horticulture
A review of Peyton Skipwith and Brian Webb’s ‘Edward Bawden’s Kew Gardens’. A beautiful book is somewhat weighed down by its scholarship
Another secret garden
Rumer Godden’s An Episode of Sparrows, first published in 1955, focuses on the roaming children — the ‘sparrows’ — of a shabby street in bomb-torn London. When ten-year-old Lovejoy Mason finds a packet of cornflower seeds and decides to create an ‘Italian’ garden hidden in a rubble-strewn churchyard, the consequences are life-changing for all who become involved. Below is the foreword to a recent reissue of the novel (Virago Modern Classics, £7.99, Spectator Bookshop, £7.49).
