Books
Thinly veiled threats
No one could ever accuse Shereen El Feki of lacking in courage. To spend five years travelling around the Arab world in search of dildos, questioning women about foreplay and… Read more
Of vice and verse
‘All human life is binary’, explains a Vestal Virgin to the time-travelling heroine of Ranjit Bolt’s verse novel, Losing It. Young and lovely, Lucy’s plan is to lose her virginity.… Read more
Bookends: A life of gay abandon
Sometimes, only the purest smut will do. Scotty Bowers’s memoir, Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars (Grove Press, £16.99) is 24 carat,… Read more
More sinned against than sinning
When I saw the title of this book, then read that it only covered the period 1600-1800 I hoped this would be a riot of comedy, something along the lines… Read more
Acting strange
Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age… Read more
The French connection
If ever there was a novel to which that old adage about not judging a book by its cover could be applied, it’s this one. If ever there was a… Read more
Same old perversions
Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25… Read more
Physical and spiritual decay
The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’ susceptibility to physical decay. The most striking thing about Piers Paul Read’s early novels was their characters’… Read more
Schlock teaser
The somewhat straightlaced theatre-going audiences of 1880s America, eager for performances by European artistes like Jenny Lind and solid, home-grown, classical actors such as Otis Skinner, were hardly prepared for… Read more
A rather orthodox doxy
‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn. ‘His cursed concubine.’ That was the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys’ judgment on… Read more
Cherchez la femme
The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as… Read more
The ultimate price
Lesley Downer is one of the most unusual authors writing in English. Years ago, determined to become an expert on the Japanese geisha, ultra-sophisticated entertainers and hostesses who are neither… Read more
Fine artist, but a dirty old man
I have always been sceptical of those passages in the ‘Ancestry’ chapters of biographies that run something like this: Through his veins coursed the rebellious blood of the Vavasours, blended… Read more
A narrow escape
For once, I felt sorry for Bill Clinton. It was January 1998, and the press reported that the President had had an intimate relationship with one Monica Lewinsky. In Independent… Read more
Throw it in a stream
I know a British couple with a Chinese daughter, pretty and fluent in English. Of course the little girl was adopted. It is necessary to steel one’s self against three… Read more
From gloom to dispair
In little more than a decade, the cosy world of Anglo-American crime fiction has been transformed by wave after wave of Scandinavian invaders. Some, like Steig Larsson, are suddenly parachuted… Read more
Not ‘a boy-crazed trollop’
For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot of trouble. For someone who barely left the house, Emily Dickinson didn’t half cause a lot… Read more
It happened one summer
For those unfamiliar with Martin Amis’s short story, ‘What Happened to Me on My Holiday’, written for The New Yorker in 1997, it was a purist exercise in autobiographical fiction;… Read more
An institution to love and cherish
Books about marriage, like the battered old institution itself, come in and out of fashion with writers, readers and politicians, but never quite die away. These two, from the latest… Read more
What a difference a gay makes
Edmund White is among the most admired of living authors, his oeuvre consisting of 20-odd books of various forms — novels, stories, essays and biographies — though each one is… 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
