Books
Politically almost too correct
Douglas Hurd’s political career ended only eight years ago, but it already seems to belong to another world. When he…
From chrysalis to butterfly
John Fowles’s diaries — or ‘disjoints’, as he calls them — are evidence of his own theory that while some…
A great painter’s likeness perfectly caught
Robert Hughes has suffered no shortage of appalling things over the past five years. He has experienced deep depression and…
Ideas received or rejected
Until I read his enthralling account of what it’s like to be a middle-class sixtysomething crack addict, I’d never quite…
A regiment to reckon with
In the spring of 1990, at the age of 21, I found myself sitting on an English hillside in the…
Family values under the hammer
In the course of John Campbell’s superb second volume of his Margaret Thatcher biography, he poses the question of what…
When physicists don’t see eye to eye
When Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, he could surely scarcely have imagined the interest it would generate and the furore it…
The play’s the thing
The early life of Arthur Miller reads a bit like the first chapters of The Adventures of Augie March by…
Youth, I do adore thee
At the risk of being vulgar, I can’t help thinking that Dr Greer’s (‘At least she’s got an “ology!”’, I…
Aches and aphorisms
It is difficult to demonstrate why the Lees-Milne diaries, of which this is the tenth volume, are among the best…
That land is their land
In 1961 the anthropologist Richard Mason was exploring a river in southern Amazonia when he was ambushed by a hitherto…
Native wood-notes wild
This is an exceptional biography, which is just as well, since I don’t think one could bear to have the…
The old order changeth
As a historical novel Thomas Gage is more Hardy than Tolstoy. The classic historical novel — as concocted by Walter…
Hobbling the sacred cows
Here’s a real cure for anyone with a bad case of things-are-getting-worse-itis. Written in 1962 principally for the American market,…
Sounding the last post
The work of the obituarist is not unlike that of the book reviewer. Both have to tell their reader what…
All knickers and knockers
Whatever else this is, an intimate portrait of Mrs Parker Bowles it is not, or at least not one written…
What you see is what you get
What’s It All About? joins Bob Geldof’s Is That It? and Auberon Waugh’s Will This Do? on a shelf of…
Northward and upward
This first volume of Bill Clinton’s biography, taking the story as far as his presidential election victory in 1992, comes…
The beauty of signal-boxes
The Duke of Bedford insisted that railway stations built on his estate had to be picturesque. He chose a half-timbered…
Rebellion in the suburbs
First published in 1914, two years after he had married Virginia, Leonard Woolf’s second novel The Wise Virgins must have…
The other island
This massive volume weighs in at seven pounds on the bathroom scales and cost The Spectator £14.50 in stamps to…
Speaking of God
Where is England’s smallest church? The question must have preoccupied nerdish retired vicars for centuries and is probably best answered…
Slogging to Byzantium
Yeats was a great poet who was also the industrious adept of a batso mystical philosophy. Do we have to…
He’s the top
The perfect anthology, like the perfect hors d’
Happy band of brothers
Very occasionally one comes across a book which, in its unexpected delights, inspires one to leap about wild with praise,…
