These legendary lives need the clutter cleared away from them occasionally. Lawrence Durrell and his brother Gerald turned their family’s prewar escape to an untouched Corfu into a myth that supplied millions of fantasies. It still bore retelling and extravagant expansion recently, if the success of ITV’s series The Durrells is any sign. (One indication
Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images… So wrote Frank O’Hara
‘Summer was the season of strangeness,’ muses Temperance, the barmaid at Little Nettlebed’s only alehouse. ‘People behaved peculiarly then.’ Temperance’s aside anchors the dramatic irony at the heart of Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel The Hounding, set in an 18th-century Oxfordshire village in the grip of a drought. In the villagers’ eyes, through which much of
We think of the Raj as controlling only India and Pakistan, and its infamous breakup happening in August 1947. It’s a story told and filmed so often, and whose echoes reverberate today with such nuclear sabre-rattling that surely there is little left to add. And please nobody mention Edwina Mountbatten’s possible affair with Jawaharlal Nehru
On 19 December 2011, at around 3.30 a.m., a young wolf in the mountains of southern Slovenia trots away from his pack and never looks back. For the next 90 days or so, Slavc (after Slavnik, the mountain of his home) lopes onwards, hardly stopping, fording fast rivers and traversing high passes, until at last,
Private Eye asked last week: Which of Michael Gove’s luckless staff at The Spectator will be assigned to review this grisly account of their editor’s marital woes? Reader, it’s me! I’m happy to do this, though, because I have an interest in how to be a political wife (I am married to Alex Burghart MP),
The 1990s and the following decade were, it is widely agreed, a bad time to be a girl. Which is strange, because a girl seemed like the best thing you could be then. Certainly better than being a woman. Not as good as being a boy or a man, of course, but since those were
On 3 June 1960, a letter appeared in The Spectator which began: Sir, We are homosexuals and we are writing because we feel strongly that insufficient is being done to enlighten public opinion on a topic which has for too long been shunned. The letter was prompted by the government’s failure to act upon the
