Graham Greene

The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical

16 March 2024 9:00 am

Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources

Adventures in Greeneland

12 August 2023 9:00 am

In skilfully told stories involving luck and changes of fortune, Osborne suggests that it’s not the hand you’re dealt that matters, but how you play it

The Index of Prohibited Books makes a fine reading list

17 September 2022 9:00 am

In a classic paradox of bureaucracy, the Index of Forbidden Books only really hit its stride when its original task…

The novels that became instant classics

15 January 2022 9:00 am

In the world of books, a modern classic is an altogether more slippery thing than a classic: it must walk…

From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages

24 April 2020 11:00 pm

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

How low can the BBC go?

21 February 2020 10:00 pm

Last weekend’s papers claimed that the government desires a ‘massively pruned back’ BBC. Former Conservative cabinet minister Damian Green and…

Franco’s exhumation could help decide the Spanish election

9 November 2019 9:00 am

I was no sooner in Madrid than General Franco was exhumed from his mausoleum not far from El Escorial. An…

Long life: Alexander Chancellor

Booze, cigarettes and Auberon Waugh: Remembering The Spectator’s 1970s revival

5 January 2019 9:00 am

‘The Spectator, having quite recently been a very bad magazine, is at present a very good one.’ Those gratifying words…

A remote island community is disrupted by the arrival of a troubled teenager

15 August 2015 9:00 am

Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…

Michael Arditti is the Graham Greene of our time

28 February 2015 9:00 am

Duncan Neville is an unlikely hero for a novel. Approaching 50, divorced and the butt of his teenage son Jamie’s…

My addiction to literary pilgrimage is akin to masturbation

17 January 2015 9:00 am

The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image…

The Parent Trap, familiar from various film versions, is a story by Eric Kastner, now republished with Walter Trier’s illustrations by Pushkin Books

The best children’s books of 2014

29 November 2014 9:00 am

If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me…

Ten years and an earthquake: the changing face of Haiti

16 August 2014 9:00 am

This summer, I returned to Haiti for the first time in ten years. I was itching to see how the…

Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple? 

22 February 2014 9:00 am

Shirley Temple, who died last week at the age of 85, was the most successful child film star in history.…