Homosexuality
The lonely struggle of Jude the obscure
Just over a century after Virginia Woolf declared that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’, the American novelist…
The Spectator’s Notes
As someone who has rarely written a sentence in praise of the late Sir Edward Heath, I hope I can…
Who’d have thought that about Ted? Well…
In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation…
Putin and the polygamists
The Kremlin is tying itself in ideological knots as it tries to make new friends in the Muslim world
The left pillories Tim Farron for his popular view
I wonder who will win the battle for Tim Farron’s soul — the Guardianistas or God? This is assuming that…
Barometer
Plagued by stigma The World Health Organisation told doctors to stop naming diseases after people, places and animals so as…
Cold comfort farm in Canada
Patrick Gale’s first historical novel is inspired by a non-story, a gap in his own family record. His great-grandfather Harry…
Good old bad old days
Anthony Quinn’s fourth novel, set in London’s artistic and theatrical circles in 1936, is not the kind in which an…
High life
I had a short chat with BBC radio concerning the actor Jack Nicholson, whom I knew slightly during the Seventies…
Autism and the Turing Fallacy
When I first heard the story of Alan Turing in my late teens I made what must be quite a…
Everything is merde
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
The Catholic civil war
Uncertainty over how much reform Pope Francis wants is splitting his church into factions
Three was a crowd
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
A Blanche Dubois of a book
Thomas W. Hodgkinson finds John Lahr’s ‘stand-alone’ biography of Tennessee Williams as confused and unbalanced as Streetcar’s heroine
Translating Proust wasn’t all
Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime
Not even Turing deserves a posthumous pardon
Ross Clark is a columnist I try to read because he is never trite. So I was sorry to miss…
No laughing matter
Swans, swans, more swans. If the lifespan of a dance critic were calculated by the number of performances of Swan…
Sex and squalor in San Francisco
Frog Music begins with a crime against a young mother, committed in a tiny space. Unlike Emma Donoghue’s bestselling novel…
A champion of liberal reform
Roy Jenkins may have been snobbish and self-indulgent, but he was also a visionary and man of principle who would have made a good prime minister, says Philip Ziegler
Old school ties
Robert Gore-Langton talks to Julian Mitchell about the painful roots of his hit play Another Country
A later beginner
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
New York notebook
Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known…
A place of rough justice
There are writers whose prose style is so fluid, so easy, the reader feels as though he has been taken…
Putin’s poison
Sochi 2014 is the least wintry Winter Olympics ever. Yes, there’s a bit of downhill shimmying going on in the…
Putin’s pink peril
Russia’s thuggish President has picked on the wrong minority
