Alfred Brendel was peerless – but he wasn’t universally loved
In middle age Alfred Brendel looked disconcertingly like Eric Morecambe – but, unlike the comedian in his legendary encounter with…
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? The BBC, it seems
‘What a lark!’ I thought to myself as I rose on a hot June morning to listen to a documentary…
The French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty
At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling…
The key to a great American key lime pie
A few years ago, a friend wrote a cookery book for the UK market, full of gorgeous dishes, many of…
What a carve up! The British flair for disastrous partition
The ‘Great Partition’ of India in 1947 led to the wider division of Britain’s ‘empire within an empire’ – and to most of the problems plaguing southern Asia today
The wolf as symbol of European anxieties
This ‘amoral outcast’ and its thieving trickery is now widely equated with the economic migrant, slipping across borders unnoticed and threatening the status quo
A season of strangeness: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, reviewed
Little Nettlebed is in the grip of serious drought, and the angry villagers are looking for scapegoats in this irresistible page-turner set in 18th-century Oxfordshire
A life among movie stars can damage your health
So Dustin Hoffman tells the teenage Matthew Specktor as they share cigarette breaks at CAA, the Los Angeles talent agency they both frequent
Spectator Competition: Who’s who?
For Competition 3405 you were invited to submit a scene in which Doctor Who has regenerated into someone very unexpected.…
The architects redesigning death
Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western…
Has my father’s BBC addiction peaked?
‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while…
Letters: Israel’s attack on Iran was no surprise
Moral support Sir: All of Tim Shipman’s reasons for the PM’s reluctance to support Israel sound outwardly plausible, though, from…
