Charlotte Moore 
Big Brother, by Lionel Shriver - review
‘I am white rice’ states Pandora Half-danarson, narrator of Lionel Shriver’s obesity fable. ‘I have always existed to set off more exciting fare.’ The exciting fare on offer is the… Read more
Servants: A Downstairs View of Twentieth-century Britain, by Lucy Lethbridge – review
The first illustration in this absorbing survey of domestic service in 20th-century Britain is a group photograph of the household servants at Erdigg, the Yorke family home in Wales. Each… Read more
'Mimi', by Lucy Ellmann - review
Harrison Hanafan is a plastic surgeon in New York. Every day, he slices and stitches deluded women, reshaping healthy flesh to pander to 21st-century aesthetics. One Christmas Eve, absent-minded Harrison… Read more
Chills, but no thrills
‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child …Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are… Read more
Mother of sorrows
This novella tells the story of the Crucifixion from the point of view of Mary. Contrary to art historical belief she was not, we are now told, kneeling at the… Read more
Another Restoration romp
Robert Merivel made his first appearance in 1989, in Restoration, Rose Tremain’s popular and acclaimed Carolingian novel. The passage of time has left the Everyman doctor sadder and theoretically wiser,… Read more
My Dear Governess, edited by Irene Goldman Price
‘I have finished Julius Caesar since I last wrote & I cannot say that it left a very glowing impression on me. It was too much like my own earliest… Read more
Welsh wizardry
After Brock is a slightly eccentric rite-of-passage novel rooted firmly in the Marches. In September 2009, we are told, an 18-year-old boy called Nat Kempsey disappeared for five days into… Read more
Cry freedom
Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that… Read more
Tragedy of Antigone
Sofka Zinovieff’s absorbing first novel has two narrative voices. Maud is the English widow of Nikitas, whose death in a mysterious accident leads her to contact Antigone, the mother-in-law she… Read more
Intrigue and foreboding
In 2009, Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada’s masterpiece about civilian resistance to Nazism, appeared in English for the first time. Now A Small Circus, Fallada’s literary breakthrough, makes its English… Read more
The Sealed Letter by Emma Donoghue
Emily ‘Fido’ Faithfull, a stout, plain, clever Victorian, founder-member of the feminist Langham Place group, manager of the ground-breaking Victoria Press which extends employment possibilities for women, has her story… Read more
All in a night’s work
This inter-war story of an Anglo-Irish family in crisis opens with a bang. Caroline Adair, recovering from measles at Butler’s Hill, her aunt and uncle’s lovely house in the South-west,… Read more
Fun-loving feminist
How to be a Woman is a manifesto memoir. Feminism, says the Times journalist Caitlin Moran, ‘has ground to a halt … shrunk down to a couple of increasingly small… Read more
All shook up
Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off… Read more
The nature of evil
Simon Baron-Cohen has spent 30 years researching the way our brains work. His study of autism led to The Essential Difference, which asked, ‘Are you an empathiser or a systemiser?’… Read more
In Di’s guise
What if Princess Diana hadn’t died, but, aided by her besotted press secretary, had faked her death and fled to America to live under an assumed identity? Is this an… Read more
Desk-bound, needing to get out more
Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing,… Read more
The Romanovs afloat
‘I have to do everything myself, I who have all my life been so spoilt.’ So lamented the Dowager Empress Marie Feodorovna, mother of Tsar Nicholas II, in the diary… Read more
Too good for words
I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether… Read more
Latest blogs
- Andrew Feldman denies calling Tory activists ‘right wing loons’ Fraser Nelson
- The swivel-eyed loons in the Conservative party are revolting. And they are right to revolt. Alex Massie
- Top Tory calls party activists ‘mad swivel-eyed loons’ James Forsyth
- Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend Camilla Swift
- Hammond on manoeuvres? The other Tory MPs who fancy a crack at the leadership Isabel Hardman
- Some anti-fascists are very fascistic Douglas Murray
- What Gove should know about Singapore schools Clarissa Tan
