Cressida Connolly 
All the Birds, Singing, by Evie Wyld - review
Half in jest, Evie Wyld has described her highly garlanded first book After the Fire, a Still Small Voice as ‘a romantic thriller about men not talking’. The same description… Read more
How to Read a Graveyard, by Peter Stanford - review
Peter Stanford likes cemeteries. Daily walks with his dog around a London graveyard acclimatised him, while the deaths of his parents set him wondering about customs of mourning and places… Read more
How Many Camels are there in Holland? by Phyillida Law - review
Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything. She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a… Read more
Growing up the hard way
Like the gingerbread house, these three novels seem at first to be a delightful and innocent place, entirely suitable for the three not-quite orphaned young girls who are Holden’s heroines.… Read more
Love stories
Unfortunately for the reading public, most of Bernadine Bishop’s working life has been spent as a psychotherapist. Having published a couple of early novels, she put aside her pen, first… Read more
Growing old disgracefully
Virginia Ironside’s novel, No! I Don’t Need Reading Glasses (Quercus £14.99) about a 65-year-old granny who belongs to a local residents’ association and does a fair bit of knitting may… Read more
The thin end of the wedge
Aunts, generally of an antic or highly unconventional kind, are a literary staple. Anyone wanting to find the best of them would do well to turn to Rupert Christiansen’s excellent… Read more
Urbs in rure
When people express nostalgia for the glory days of British television, it doesn’t take long for them to propose the 1966 BBC play Cathy Come Home as among the pinnacles… Read more
Contrarian to the last
We all love Oscar Wilde for saying, with his final breath, ‘I am dying beyond my means’. We love it because it’s funny, but also because it shows that he was… Read more
Are You My Mother, by Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel’s first book, Fun Home, enjoyed great acclaim: a memoir presented in comic-strip form, it described her father’s suicide and hidden homosexuality, her childhood visits to the family funeral… Read more
More table talk
Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin has a lot to answer for. In the months after its publication, it became the printed equivalent of holy communion: wheresoever two… Read more
A friendly poet
In real life, Stephen Spender was gentle and very tall, with wide-open pale blue eyes and a persistent air of slight hesitancy, as if he expected to be violently contradicted… Read more
It concentrates the mind wonderfully
It’s odd, but we mostly go about as if death were optional, something we could get out of, like games at school. Philip Gould, in When I Die, admits that… Read more
A bit of slap and tickle
Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull… Read more
Here be monsters
The lovely title of this book comes from the philosopher David Hume. The question he posed was this: if a man grew up familiar with every shade of blue but… Read more
Bookends: Trouble and strife
It isn’t true that Joanna Trollope (pictured above) only produces novels about the kind of people who have an Aga in their kitchen: what she writes about are families. Her… Read more
Finding Mr Wright
The film When Harry Met Sally may be infamous for the scene in which the heroine mimics orgasm in a crowded café, but the real point of the story is… Read more
A waist of shame
Britain has the worst obesity rates in Europe, with one in four adults now clinically obese. A friend who works in orthopaedic surgery tells me that at least 80 per… Read more
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality… Read more
Bookends: Squelch of the bladder-wrack
What’s not to like about Candida Lycett Green’s Seaside Resorts (Oldie Publications, £14.99)? Lovely colour photographs of over 100 of England’s prettiest seaside towns, accompanied by spry, architecturally informed little… Read more
Latest blogs
- Can any government really expect to carry out ambitious reform? Isabel Hardman
- Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend Camilla Swift
- Drummer Lee Rigby Douglas Murray
- Eight Golden Rules for Tragedy Tweeting Freddy Gray
- Government behaving badly over ‘quietly aborted’ lobbying reform Iain Anderson
- Vice is vanishing from Britain Leo McKinstry
- Edmund Burke and post-modern conservatism David Blackburn
