The Spectator

Alasdair Gray gives us a vivid new Paradiso

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday 1300. Dante Alighieri, a figure in his own work, has lost his way in middle age and is alone and frightened in the darkness. The ghost of the Roman poet Virgil is about to show him Hell: Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, for the right path was lost. Begun in the early 14th century, Dante’s poem is, for many, the greatest single work of western literature. With its dramatic chiaroscuro of hellish fuming mists and paradisal stellar regions, the poem is ‘awful’ in the archaic sense of the word (still valid in the Italian terribile), meaning to inspire awe.

Scott Bradfield

No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck

Lee Langley

An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed

Sam Leith

Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

Melanie McDonagh

Animal magic: children’s books for Christmas

Steven Poole

Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme

Marcus Nevitt

When sedition was rife in 18th-century London

Declan Ryan

Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman

Justin Marozzi

Is there anything left worth joking about?

Scott Bradfield

No writer was better suited to chronicle the Depression than John Steinbeck

Lee Langley

An unquiet life: There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job, by Kikuko Tsumura, reviewed

Sam Leith

Barack Obama was decidedly a man of action as well as words

Melanie McDonagh

Animal magic: children’s books for Christmas

Steven Poole

Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme

Marcus Nevitt

When sedition was rife in 18th-century London

Declan Ryan

Suicide was always a spectre for John Berryman

Justin Marozzi

Is there anything left worth joking about?

The Book Club

Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC

51 min listen

The Book Club

Patrick Barwise and Peter York: The War Against the BBC

51 min listen

On this week's Book Club podcast, we're talking about a subject that never ceases to arouse strong feelings: Auntie Beeb. My guests, Patrick Barwise and Peter York, say - in their new book The War Against The BBC: How an unprecedented combination of hostile forces is destroying Britain's greatest cultural institution... And why you should care - that if we lose the BBC we will miss it. But isn't it a soft-left Establishment mouthpiece, riddled with groupthink and funded by an anachronistic and unjustifiable tax? Isn't it a market-distorting, bureaucratic, top-heavy behemoth that we're better off without? They make the case, here, for why not.

Philip Hensher

Harold Bloom finally betrays how little he really understood literature

Philip Hensher

Harold Bloom finally betrays how little he really understood literature

Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ has gone everywhere in the world since 1830. A professional scholar in Uruguay, Papua New Guinea or New Haven, Connecticut, reading the lines ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/Upon the lonely moated grange’ might want to ask a few questions. Do English houses ever have moats? (Yes — Ightham Mote and Madresfield Court are famous examples.) Can we find houses with a humble thatch and also a moat? (A harder question – Tennyson’s poem set a vogue in landscape design as well as poetry.) Or, taking a different tack, where does the use of the word ‘moat’ as a verb come from? (Easy — ‘moated grange’ is from the poem’s subject, Measure for Measure.) What sort of word was it by 1830? (Harder — it comes up in translations with a taste for the archaic, and technical descriptions of architecture.

Stephen Bayley

High-speed trains, planes and automobiles are increasingly redundant

Sarah Ditum

Claire Messud helps us see the familiar with new eyes

Stephanie Merritt

A closing of ranks: The Searcher, by Tana French, reviewed

Tibor Fischer

Tortured youths: how childhood misery often makes for genius

Peter Parker

Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed

Suzi Feay

A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed

Adam Begley

Cheering for Jürgen Klopp: Liverpool FC’s manager can do no wrong

Rose Prince

Sunshine on a plate: the year’s best cookbooks

Stephen Bayley

High-speed trains, planes and automobiles are increasingly redundant

Sarah Ditum

Claire Messud helps us see the familiar with new eyes

Stephanie Merritt

A closing of ranks: The Searcher, by Tana French, reviewed

Tibor Fischer

Tortured youths: how childhood misery often makes for genius

Peter Parker

Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed

Suzi Feay

A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed

Adam Begley

Cheering for Jürgen Klopp: Liverpool FC’s manager can do no wrong

Rose Prince

Sunshine on a plate: the year’s best cookbooks

The Book Club

James Hawes on why the break-up of the Union is inevitable

43 min listen

The Book Club

James Hawes on why the break-up of the Union is inevitable

43 min listen

In this week's Book Club podcast my guest is James Hawes. The bestselling author of The Shortest History of Germany turns his attention in his latest book to our own Island Story: The Shortest History of England. He tells me why he thinks there's real value in so brief an overview of our history, how Jurassic rock formations doomed our politics, why we never got over the Conquest, how the break-up of the Union is now an inevitability, and why the Cross of St George is a funny emblem for English nationalists to rally behind.

Kate Womersley

Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed

Kate Womersley

Masculinity in crisis: Men and Apparitions, by Lynne Tillman, reviewed

Masculinity, we are often told, is in crisis. The narrator of Men and Apparitions, Professor Ezekiel (Zeke) Stark, both studies this crisis and personally confirms it. ‘I came naturally — haha — to observing my posse and me, guys late twenties to forty, and our attitudes to women, ourselves as “men,” etc’ he says, by way of introduction to his anthropological thesis about growing up under feminism. Prepare for mansplaining littered with tedious verbal tics, which is oddly compelling to read. Zeke is between things. Born on the cusp of Gen X, a middle child to middle-class parents, he’s loitering on the tenure track of East Coast ‘Acadoomia’. There’s his Mother, an editor, who never loved Father, ‘a condescending asshole’, Brother Hart, a bully, and Little Sister, a ‘selectively mute’ fan of Virginia Woolf, who also kills herself.