Fiction
Bookends: Not filthy enough
The Pursued (Penguin, £12.99) is a lost crime thriller by C. S. Forester, the author of the Hornblower novels. It was written in 1935, rediscovered in 2003 and is now… Read more
A literary curio
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from… Read more
Children’s Books: Myth and magic
It was the second week of term and my grandson’s birthday. He had just started at primary school and the only alternative to social suicide seemed to be to invite… Read more
Pea-soupers and opium dens
So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence… Read more
Books of the Year
A further selection of our reviewers’ favourite reading in 2011 Richard Davenport-Hines Amidst the din, slogans and panic of modern publishing, my cherished books are tender, calm and achieve a… Read more
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
The novels of Jane Austen have much in common with traditional detective fiction. It is an affinity that P. D. James has herself explored, notably in her essay ‘Emma Considered… Read more
Bird Brain by Guy Kennaway
Basil Peyton-Crumbe is a multi-millionaire landowner. An embattled man known to all, even his dogs, as ‘Banger’, he claims to have despatched at least 41,000 pheasants with the cheap old… 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
The ripple effect
Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her… Read more
Books of the Year
Our regular reviewers were asked to name the books they’d most enjoyed reading this year. More choices next week • A.N. Wilson Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work… Read more
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Jonathan Franzen. David Foster Wallace. Jeffrey Eugenides. Giant, slow-moving, serious writers, notching up about a novel per decade, all with their sights set on The Big One, The Beast, The… 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
The Golden Hour by William Nicholson
He’s got a winning formula, this writer, and he’s sticking to it. Set the action over seven days, in and around the Sussex town of Lewes, with occasional day trips… Read more
The Thread by Victoria Hislop
Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called… Read more
Friendships resurrected
A fact which often surprises those who pick up the Bible in adulthood, having not looked at it for years, is how very short the stories are. Adam and Eve,… Read more
In the land of doublespeak
An Oxford don and poet, Patrick McGuinness lived in Bucharest in 1989, and in this fictionalised account of the regime’s death throes he puts his first-hand experience to compelling use.… Read more
In a class of his own
Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School captures the hilarity and pathos of an eccentric headmaster and the unusual establishment he founded in Kensington in the Thirties. A.N.Wilson introduces us… Read more
Deeper into Mervyn Peake
The first two volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy were published in 1946 and 1950, but by 1954, when I was first alerted to them by a school-friend, Peake had… Read more
A well-told lie
Autobiography provides a sound foundation for a work mainly of fiction. A voyage in an ocean liner provides a sound framework of time and place. Michael Ondaatje was born in… Read more
Latest blogs
- The Liberal Democrats, the natural party of government? James Forsyth
- Lord Mandelson gives Miliband two big tasks Isabel Hardman
- Scotland’s 2013 Eurovision triumph Fraser Nelson
- Andrew Feldman denies calling Tory activists ‘swivel-eyed 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
