My first love was a penguin. Pengwee was an adorable brown and white emperor chick who had my heart and broke it the day he dived into the bath. After a week in the airing cupboard he smelled of fish – surprising in a soft toy. But then penguins are surprising. Towards the end of
Valentine Low is an old-school royal journalist; less muckraking reporter, more Establishment eye (the Times for 15 years) across our nation’s oldest institution. It is his disarming charm (I’ve had the pleasure of televised royal parley with him) that has guaranteed him access to the great and occasionally ghastly in the higher echelons of British
Before the second world war, the Croydon-born cricketer C.B. Fry was offered the throne of Albania. It’s not certain why. Possibly because his splendid party piece involved leaping from a stationary position backwards on to a mantelpiece. Or because, historically, the Balkan nation has been so inexplicably Anglophile as to appreciate the pratfalling funnyman Norman
Among the many colourful and captivating characters who people Elizabeth Drayson’s authoritative, fascinating account of 1,300 years of shared Islamic and European history is Abbas ibn Firnas, born around 810 in what is now southern Spain but was then the Muslim-ruled emirate of Cordoba. An innovative scientist who is remembered as the father of aeronautics
Forty or so years ago, when I was at university, my friends Richard, Terence, Harry and I would often go to the Oxford Union to play snooker. There were two immaculate snooker tables in a large room at the top of the building and almost no one ever went there except for us. Unfortunately, our
‘I am by trade a man of letters,’ Evelyn Dolman tells us as the curtain rises on Venetian Vespers. ‘I had a middling reputation in the period coming to be known, in our increasingly Frenchified age, as the fin de siècle, that is, the 1890s.’ If his writing mostly appears in the review sections, his
When memories come back to you, wrote W.G. Sebald in Austerlitz, his digressive novel about history and how it is remembered, their dreamlike quality sometimes makes you ‘feel as if you were looking at the past through a glass mountain’. Malcolm Gaskill’s exploration of the wartime adventures of his great-uncle Ralph, captured in Italian-occupied Libya
Women and their guilty secrets; women and their innocent secrets; women and men’s secrets; women and state secrets; DNA tests busting women’s secrets – in her enticingly titled The Book of Revelations: Women and their Secrets, Juliet Nicolson comes at her subject from all possible angles. There is also a strongly feminist emphasis on wronged
Yarnton, Oxfordshire. A teenage girl is dumped face down in a pit, her legs bent and tethered. Around her lie the crania, jawbones and ribs of several children. Taken alone, this scene of 9th-century carnage puzzles as much as it horrifies. When placed in the wider context of a seemingly universal need to ensure that
Twenty years on from winning the Booker Prize with The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai returns with a vast masterpiece of a love story which has been longlisted for this year’s prize. Our two protagonists, Sonia and Sunny, come from wealthy neighbouring families in Allahabad, but both are in America when the novel begins. Sonia
Earlier this year a former staffer of what was then Facebook, now Meta, wrote a gossipy tell-all memoir about her time in the office there. It was a huge hit – especially after the company’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan secured a ruling to prevent its promotion. Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams, proved that
Boris Johnson claims that in his first year at Oxford he attended just one lecture. Delivered in the crepuscular gloom of the Pitt Rivers Museum, it was about Rapa Nui, the tiny Pacific island 2,200 miles from mainland Chile. As a boy, Johnson had read the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl’s Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter
The West gets China wrong. Spectator readers know the country as a vampire state feasting on foreign intellectual property and spewing out phony economic data in its thirst for wealth and power. It certainly is these things – but it also isn’t. It is more complex, and telling only half the story is ultimately self-defeating.
In 1984 Innocenzo Monti died after a short illness. He and the writer Lalla Romano had been married since 1932 and had met in the late 1920s in her native Piedmont. Romano – a poet, painter and the author of 19 novels – wrote the story of their life together in her 1987 book Nei
The discriminating Argentinian novelist Jorge Luis Borges once revealed his fondness for ‘hourglasses, maps, 18th-century typography, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson’ – a list that was quirky and eclectic, adjectives that neatly encapsulate Robert Louis Stevenson himself. The story has often been told – but it’s a good one –
A hundred years ago, T.S. Eliot wrote to Geoffrey Faber, for whose publishing company he had just started work, complaining: ‘The Defence of the West… is a subject about which everyone thinks he has something to say.’ Plus ça change? Back then, people were coming to terms with a war that had shown the West
Rome’s first African emperor, Septimius Severus, was renowned during his reign (193-211 AD) for the mass killings of his rivals (ruthlessness even by ancient standards); for his genocide against the Scots (a rare recourse, despite Rome’s bad reputation as imperialists); and his budget-stretching generosity to his soldiers. He had an unusually glamorous Syrian wife, Julia
‘The only solution for anger at your husband is to bake him a pie,’ says the eponymous heroine of Kate Riley’s first (and, she claims, last) novel, Ruth. ‘She heard it first from her mother and understood: daily acts of love were the best way to express anger.’ This is advice that Ruth both eyerolls
What is art for? How can it, should it, relate to the political framework of its time? How far can it shade into ‘propaganda of the imagination’? These are some of the questions threading through Andy Friend’s compelling account of the first decade of the Artists International Association, or AIA, a vital but under-explored British
Ian McEwan delivers pleasure on the page with the ticktock reliability of an expensive Swiss watch. Even the lesser novels are immaculately written and cleverly plotted, full of provocative ideas, captivating characters and compelling incidents. In the better novels, he achieves a kind of elevated self-awareness, a supercharged intelligence that gives the fiction what feels
