Ali Smith is that rare thing in Britain: a much-beloved experimental writer. Part of her attraction for readers is that she continually connects formal innovation and the freedom to reinvent a story with the freedom to reinvent the self. It’s a beguiling proposition that can make liberation seem like a matter of style. Following the
The gift books come in all shapes and sizes this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat and thin, rather like their writers, I would guess. Biggest and fattest of them all is The Art of Aardman (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). This is a coffee-table book, pure and simple, that celebrates 40 years of
A few years ago, in Berne, I visited the apartment where Einstein wrote his theory of special relativity, which changed our understanding of the world forever. It’s a small apartment, plain and nondescript. The best thing about it is the view. From the window you can see Berne’s huge medieval clock, the Zytglogge. It was
When turbaned warriors from Daesh (or Isis) advanced on Raqqa in Syria two years ago, they whooped wildly about having ‘broken the Sykes-Picot Agreement’. They were celebrating athe destruction of national frontiers which had stood for nearly a century, since the fall of the Ottoman empire in 1918. They were also venting their spleen against
Robert Twigger’s father was born in a Himalayan hill resort and carried to school in a sedan chair. His son, born in 1965 and long fascinated by the region, has produced a social and cultural history of the mountains. It is a hybrid volume — and why not? Twigger leaves no mountain path untouched in
The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardy’s funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 January 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Housman, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both the prime minister and leader of the oppposition. This distinguished gathering was not strictly necessary for the job at hand, because Hardy’s coffin merely contained his ashes — all that there was
Over the past year, we have lost two names cherished by Spectator readers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic for 20 years before he moved to the Times, as well as editing the monthly magazine Opera, died last December, and Eric Christiansen, the Oxford medieval historian, who was a regular book reviewer here for many years,
Timothy Hyman’s remarkable new book makes the case for the relevance of figurative painting in the 20th century, a period effectively dominated by modernist abstraction. He identifies an alternative tradition of potent human-centred painting, coming out of Cubism and Expressionism and tracing its lineage through Chagall and Leger, the Italians Carlo Carra and Mario Sironi,
You learn startling things about the long entanglement of the British with Spain on every page of Simon Courtauld’s absorbing and enjoyable new book, which is not a travelogue but a collection of historical vignettes arranged geographically. Did you know, for instance, that the first Spanish football team was founded by two Scottish doctors working
The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the birth of the breakfast cereal in The Road to Wellville to Alfred Kinsey and the creation of sexology in The Inner Circle. This might draw comparisons with James Ellroy, Boyle’s exact contemporary, except that where
The Un-Discovered Islands could not be more different in substance — though it is similar in style — to Malachy Tallack’s debut, Sixty Degrees North. In that he book he took a revealing pilgrimage around the places which lay, like his home of Shetland, on the 60th parallel, and found a range of concerns about
If you were to take a large dragnet and scoop up all the shoppers in the haberdashery department of Peter Jones in Sloane Square, your catch would be a group of women of the kind given voice in this marvellous little book. Readers old enough to remember Joyce Grenfell will know the type. Ysenda Maxtone
It’s not immediately obvious, but the silhouette on the dust jacket — soldiers advancing in single file, on foot (‘boots on the ground’) isn’t one squad, but five soldiers from different campaigns. From left to right, first comes the British infantryman of the second world war; next is a ‘jock’ from (I think) the Korean
Genial, erudite and companionable over most of its 760 pages, this stout Georgian brick of a neighbourhood history at length flings itself in fury through a toff’s window. Much of Dan Cruickshank’s book has shown with learned charm how, in its tangle of ancient streets just east of the City of London, Spitalfields has always
The Benson family was one of the most extraordinary of Victorian England, and they certainly made sure that we have enough evidence to dwell on them. Edward White Benson was a brilliantly clever clerical young man of 23 when he proposed to his 11-year-old cousin Minnie Sidgwick. He had been the effective head of his
One of David Cameron’s choices on Desert Island Discs, this book reminds us, was ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. The book does not, however, explain why Cameron chose the Benny Hill ditty. Consulting the online archive, I found the then leader of the opposition explaining that ‘when you’re asked to sing a song’,
There is a common assumption that experimental writing — for want of a better term — is obscure, joyless and arid. Or worse: that it is fake (or ‘pseudy’), a deception practised upon either the deluded or gullible reader. So I wonder what people who hold such assumptions would make of this. It constitutes the
‘Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it!’ So sighed Sybille Bedford, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in Sanary-sur-Mer. Aldous Huxley settled in the same fishing village in 1930, writing to his sister-in-law: ‘Here all is exquisitely lovely. Sun, roses, fruit, warmth. We bathe and bask.’ James Lees-Milne perched further along the coast
We financial hacks have been encouraged, indoctrinated perhaps, to think that London’s Big Bang was a Very Good Thing. That moment in October 1986 when the City threw off old shackles and embraced global finance, ditched boozy lunches and chased money like never before was a result for us all — so we’ve been led
Richard Francis’s new novel covers ostensibly familiar ground. Set in and around Boston in the 1690s, it tells the story of the Salem trials, which resulted in the execution of 20 people (14 of them women), and which are sometimes regarded as a hinge event in the evolution of American secularism. As the historian George