Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Meat and drink for the imagination

Judith Flanders

Saturday, 13th April 2002

I sat on the second stair in our house in a Montreal suburb. The dog passed me from time to time and stopped to sniff, but no one else did, neither stopping nor sniffing. I don't know why I chose that place, I never had before, and I never did afterwards. Whatever the reason, on that step I read Little Women, the first 'grown-up' book that ever came my way: a book with no pictures. And for the time it took, I was in turn Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy. I didn't understand their father's absence in the Civil War - I don't think I even understood it was a war. I certainly didn't understand the references to Pilgrim's Progress. But what I did understand was that this was a new place, one where I fitted in.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

More articles from: Judith Flanders | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Et tu, Scott? Bush’s press aide turns on his boss

James Forsyth

James Forsyth talks to Scott McClellan, former press secretary to the President, about his new book attacking the Bush administration, its methods and its deceits

The Law Lords are right to resist the government

Lord Lloyd of Berwick

Lord Lloyd of Berwick says that the government’s emergency legislation to overturn their lordships’ ruling on witness anonymity is part of a ‘gradual usurpation’ of our liberties

I was starstuck by David Cameron

Steven Berkoff

In the week of the Spectator Summer Party, Steven Berkoff recalls another of our celebrations at which he sought out the Tory leader and forgave his confusion of Brando and Dean

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House

Brown’s security strategy is the worst of all worlds

David Davis

It’s draconian, expensive and ineffective, says David Davis. All the evidence shows that the Prime Minister is eroding our civil liberties pointlessly