Lewis Jones 
Eleven Days in August, by Matthew Cobb - review
It is fair to assume that Professor Matthew Cobb has often been asked if he is related to Professor Richard Cobb since he begins the acknowledgements of his new book… Read more
The boys’ brigade
British schoolboys doubtless have quite different fantasies nowadays, but for much of the last century most of them liked to imagine themselves leading their friends in guerrilla warfare against the… Read more
Dirty tricks campaigns
There are already two excellent books about the Profumo Affair — An Affair of State (1987) by Phillip Knightley and Caroline Kennedy, and Bringing the House Down (2007) by David… Read more
The Wiggins streak
As the first British winner of the Tour de France and a gold medalist at London 2012, Bradley Wiggins is a national hero, and though he insists he is an… Read more
Agonies and ecstasies
William James considered an hallucination to be ‘as good and true a sensation as if there were a real object there’, except that the ‘object happens to be not there,… Read more
Living on the brink
To write this book Aman Sethi, a journalist for the Hindu, spent five years hanging out with the casual labourers of Bara Tooti Chowk in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, who live… Read more
Off the beaten tracks
In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on… Read more
A dark family past
Like the Dombeys, Pitts, Amises et al, les Dumas are famously père et fils, but there was of course also a grand-père, Thomas-Alexandre, or ‘Alex’ the first, who was a… Read more
American enterprise
The title of A.A. Gill’s latest book comes from Emma Lazarus’s poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883), which is inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your… Read more
Bookends: One for the road
Jay McInerney is best known for his first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), which winningly combined sophistication and naivety. In The Juice (Bloomsbury, £14.99), his third collection of wine… Read more
Femmes du monde
At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an… Read more
Bookends: … and the inner tube
In the early 1990s, when Boris Johnson was making his name as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent, Sonia Purnell was his deputy, and last year she published a biography of… Read more
Bookends: Disarming but disingenuous
At first glance, Be the Worst You Can Be (Booth-Clibborn Editions, £9.99) by Charles Saatchi (pictured above with his wife, Nigella Lawson) seems a rather distinguished book, with its gilt… Read more
The end of the affair?
Of those caught up in the 1963 Profumo affair, the only winner seems to have been that blithe spirit Mandy Rice-Davies. Everyone else lost. Profumo’s family bore the brunt, of… Read more
Journal of a disappointed man
Simon Goldhill introduces his new book by recalling a lunch with his editor, who suggested he make a pilgrimage and write about it. Pilgrimages, he reflected, tend to be made… Read more
Bookends: An unreal world
Even by Hollywood standards, Carrie Fisher is pretty crazy. She was born a Hollywood princess, and remembers her parents — Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher — as ‘not really people… Read more
Settling old scores
As a boy, Brian Sewell was unimpressed by opera but enraptured by pantomime which, he reveals in Outsider, sowed in him ‘an undying ambition, never fulfilled, to play the Widow… Read more
Bookends: No joke being a comedian
Failure is the very stuff of comedy, but not of showbiz memoirs, so Small Man in a Book (Michael Joseph, £20) is unusual. Rob Brydon’s success came quite late, with… Read more
Bookends: About a boy
The Go-Between was L.P. Hartley’s best novel, Joseph Losey’s best film, and probably Harold Pinter’s best screenplay. In the novel, the Norfolk house and estate are fairly incidental but, as… Read more
Call of Valhalla
In an appendix to this powerfully poetic and beautifully produced little book, A.S. Byatt explains that when Canongate invited her to write a myth, she knew immediately which one to… Read more
Latest blogs
- Same Sex Marriage Bill: how MPs voted The Spectator
- Gay marriage easily passes third reading vote in the Commons James Forsyth
- Labour claims credit for gay marriage bill Isabel Hardman
- David Cameron has caused a crisis in conservatism Miles Windsor
- Cameron has reached the tipping point Martin Bright
- Sir David Nicholson to go: but will it change the culture at the top of the NHS? Isabel Hardman
- Scottish independence: it’s still (almost) all about oil. Alex Massie
