Books
All that remains
Barnaby Rogerson on how his collaboration with a great photographer has brought the ancient world very close
Down the rabbit hole
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
Back to black
Michael Hann on the most enduring of pop subcultures
The rewriting of Roald Dahl is an act of cultural vandalism
The vandals have come for Roald Dahl. His books for children are to be cleansed of their ‘offensive’ content. Sensitivity…
A feast for the eyes
Jonathan Meades on the art of menus
A call to arms
I’ve agreed to interview the author and journalist Andrew Doyle about his new book at the Conservative party conference –…
Caught in the Mittel
Joseph Roth’s writing about interwar Europe speaks to present-day Ukraine
Salman Rushdie overcame his fear
After Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for publishing The Satanic Verses in 1989, Julian Barnes gave Salman Rushdie…
The tiger who came for me
What we can learn from Jim Corbett’s big-cat tales
On the same page
In the West End of London there is an alley which insinuates its way between the Charing Cross Road and…
The Spectator’s Notes
I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a…
My Sally Rooney conversion
I tried to dislike the writing of Sally Rooney. But I failed. I retain some resistance to Sally Rooney the…
‘I came, I saw, I scribbled’
Graeme Thomson talks to former Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan about his first art folio
Don’t frighten the horses
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life.…
Rebel yell
Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes…
The rise of the wimps
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
High life
Gstaad This is my last week in the Alps and I’m trying to get it all in – skiing, cross-country,…
Wicked smaht
When I was ten years old I had a babysitter who was a beautiful graduate student at an Ivy League…
Building block
We should learn to love our turn-of-the-millennium architecture, says Helen Barrett, starting with the Dome
Where’s my trigger warning?
Last week brought the news that some universities have attached more ‘trigger warnings’ to certain books, concerned that students may…
Bring me my Spear
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is…
Neville’s advocate
Nigel Jones talks to the writer Robert Harris about Blair, Johnson and Polanski, cancel culture and his quest to rehabilitate Neville Chamberlain
High resolution
Jimmy Chin is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough: he both climbs snow, ice and rock and films other mountaineers doing it too, writes Theo Zenou
Old school ties
It is incredibly hard to convey the fleeting invincibility and passionate self-significance that we feel on the cusp of adulthood.…
Fight club
When book groups turn nasty
