Books
Low life
‘Yes, I will have a coffee,’ said the van driver. He’d driven down to the south of France from Devon.…
Diary
I first visited Orford in 1970, at peak Cold War when this stretch of the East Anglian coast was one…
Porn again
A woman is eating a pie in her car as it gets an automatic wash. Careful to keep the pie…
In two minds
Can people of one race really understand the experience of another? asks Colin Grant
Peake practice
Mervyn Peake’s unsettling illustrations reveal a gentle, kindly man with the soul of a pirate, says Daisy Dunn
A podcast about the literary canon that actually deepens your knowledge (sort of)
While most of life’s pleasures can be shared, reading is lonely. It’s more than possible for six friends to enjoy…
When things fall apart
Okay, I admit it. I have a girl crush on Juliet Stevenson. Ever since I first saw her in the…
Floor show
Sophie Haigney on the weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets
Beige-washed Burton
The BBC has been having a good pandemic. Stuck at home, a generation raised on podcasts and YouTube has discovered…
The lost boys
The roots of incel subculture – and its magnificent memes – stretch back to Goethe’s Werther and beyond, says Nina Power
The joy of the drive-by birthday party
It is a relief to parents that young children are allowed out a bit now as the length of the…
Chef’s Notebook
I’d never have thought I’d be good at doing nothing. Or rather walking the dogs, loafing in the sun, trying…
The real deal – or not
One of the stranger things that happened in the period just before lockdown was the sudden disappearance of audiences from…
The dream is over
It started when, the day after the announcement of some lockdown easing, I drove five miles along the coast road.…
The wonder of Wodehouse
Everyone knows a Lord Emsworth. Mine lives south of the river and wears caterpillars in his hair and wine on…
Hogsflesh and herring
Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion, real name Bruce Frederick Cummings, earned his living measuring the legs of lice in the Natural…
Author’s notebook
To my surprise, what I miss most about life before the lockdown are parties. As others pine for restaurants and…
Human soup
The earliest depictions of the Americas were eye-popping, and shaped European art, says Laura Gascoigne
For now, age isn’t just a number
When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t…
Candid camera
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
Barometer
Admitting defeat 8 May is celebrated as VE Day, but it is also a date which marks a significant English…
The ridiculousness of the bookshelf police
‘People want to know why Michael Gove owns “racist” and “anti-Semitic” books’, reports the Independent’s website. By ‘people’ it actually…
Lockdown productivity? Let it go
On the day our A-level exams began some wit wrote on the blackboard: ‘I wasted time, and now doth time…
Letters
The closing of churches Sir: Stephen Hazell-Smith is quite right in writing that churches should re-open (Letters, 18 April), however…
On the contrary
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
