Book Reviews

‘Village’, to most middle-Englanders, conjures up a cosy, living community. Perhaps the post office is threatened with closure or the bus timetable is to be cut, but the hanging baskets continue to be tended, the village green still hosts games of cricket, there are moneyed retirees or commuters eager to buy the houses. It is not like that, of course, in much of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and even less so in Europe’s more remote peasant communities. Political, social and economic change has drained many villages of their people, and only the old remain. Tom Pow visits one in Spain where the youngest inhabitant is seventy, and the sad conclusion of

Over on the books blog, SNP MP Pete Wishart shares his favourite books with Spectator readers. He reveals which tomes he’d save from a burning Scottish – rather than British- Library. There’s plenty more Scots culture on offer, along with a tiger who came to tea, and the more practical reading material he’d set for his son now that he’s a student.

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is being republished as well as adapted for the screen by the BBC.  I first discovered the tetralogy when, in an attempt to improve my chances, I asked my future mother-in-law for a list of must-read novels.  Parade’s End and The Good Soldier featured near the top of the list. The Good Soldier is Ford’s most remembered work and at one time he considered it his first and last novel.  In his memoirs, Return to Yesterday, he recalls that on the 28th of June 1914, ‘there was to be no more writing for me—not even any dabbling in literary affairs.’  But then there was the

Walk into a coffee shop on any high street today and you’re confronted by an amazing array of caffeine-connected choices: flat white, red eye and doppio to name a few. We’ve become coffee connoisseurs with our own particular preferences for skinny or full fat, dry or wet. Yet the words we use to describe our favourite latte or cappuccino are fairly recent. We’ve only started to use them in the last five years or so as we’ve embraced the coffee culture of Australia and New Zealand (flat white), New York (red eye) and Italy (doppio). New trends demand new words and these global linguistic influences have quickly percolated into our

Author of classic children’s novel Carrie’s War and the Booker shortlisted Circles of Deceit, Nina Bawden has died today aged 87. Apart from writing over forty novels for adults and children, she campaigned for justice in one of her last books after the 2002 Potter’s Bar railway crash took the life of her second husband Austen Kark. Interspersed with love letters, Dear Austen tells of ‘the lamentable failure of all governments since 1945 to take proper responsibility for the country’s rail infrastructure’ and it was her attempt to do what she could ‘to put that negligence right’. Read an extract here. Bawden also read The Spectator on occasion. In January 1986 she wrote into the

On the 5th of August Mary Robinson delivered the annual Nelson Mandela lecture in Cape Town. It should have been an occasion when the former Irish President and UN Human Rights Commissioner looked back on South Africa’s achievements since the end of apartheid. Yet her speech will probably be remembered for just one sentence: ‘…the ANC’s moral authority has been eroded, tainted by allegations of corruption; a temporary betrayal of its history.’ From an old friend of the ruling party this was damning indeed, but is she right to refer to corruption as a ‘temporary betrayal?’ The ANC’s history is more complex and more difficult than supporters like Mrs Robinson