California
Why Trump will win again in 2020
This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. My reasons for thinking Trump was going to be…
The Bears v. the Rabbits: The Feral Detective, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Jonathan Lethem’s new book is billed as ‘his first detective novel since Motherless Brooklyn’, which won America’s national book critics…
LA used to be fun – dope has just made it dull
Los Angeles stinks. Not just of the usual things: sex, money, suntan oil, hipster food, surfer wax — odours that…
Alice’s restaurant
Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known…
Downtown Los Angeles
There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the…
Grandma: a feminist comedy that punches magnificently above its weight
Apologies if you were expecting a review of Star Wars here, but Disney is not allowing critics access prior to…
The trip of a lifetime
Aldous Huxley reported his first psychedelic experience in The Doors of Perception (1954), a bewitching little volume that soon became…
Portrait of the week
Home Tom Hayes, aged 35, a former City trader who rigged the Libor rates daily for nearly four years while…
Watery depths
I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad…
American beauty
It is true that, like wine, certain artists don’t travel. Richard Diebenkorn, subject of the spring exhibition in the Royal…
Forlorn Hope
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…
Geek god
Believers in omnipotent machine intelligence are reshaping the world to fit their fantasies
Mass murder and the Hollywood ending
I’ve found myself strangely drawn to the videos made by the 22-year-old assassin Elliot Rodger just before he went on…
It has to stop?
Upspeak can damage your career prospects
Darling Flufftail … beloved Pinkpaws
The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor
