Books
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
O what a lovely Waugh!
Sumptuous, glorious, luminous, lavish: Granada’s 40-year-old adaptation of Brideshead Revisited remains the sine qua non of mini-series, says Mark McGinness
Dave Eggers cancels Amazon
Selling books through Amazon is now part and parcel of a working author’s life. It would be a brave writer…
Kate Clanchy and the new censorship in publishing
‘There’s more than one way to burn a book’, wrote Ray Bradbury, in a coda to the 1979 edition of…
Writer’s notebook
When, three years ago, I announced my retirement from writing fiction, the only thing that surprised me was the surprise…
It’s who you know
All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…
Sense and sensibility
Zoe Dubno on the rise of the ‘sensitivity reader’, a seductively cheap way for publishers to cancel-proof their books
The importance of being earnest
Ken Burns made his name in 1990 with The Civil War, the justly celebrated 11-and-a-half-hour documentary series that gave America’s…
Queen of Bohemia
Nina Hamnett’s art has long been overshadowed by her wild, hedonistic life, but that is changing, says Hermione Eyre — and about time
What Meghan Markle can learn from Enid Blyton
The year is 2070 and English Heritage are unveiling their latest Blue Plaque: ‘The Duchess of Sussex, children’s author, lived…
