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
Best remembered now in the English-speaking world as a lyricist, Friedrich Schiller is often quoted for his line: ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.’ I was waiting for that observation in A Short History of Stupidity. It didn’t appear, but Stuart Jeffries assembles an impressive team of thinkers who have come to the
I must say, calling a book Fires Which Burned Brightly promises much. At best, from the jaded reviewer’s point of view, an autobiography of delusional self-aggrandisement; at worst, a wild mismatch between the, well, incendiary language of the title and the potentially humdrum contents. It might have been dreamed up by a master satirist intending
In the face of unendurable pain that must be endured and unimaginable loss that must be imagined, jokes should not be resisted or turned away. Miriam Toews, describing the day that her father ended his life, remembers him assessing the outfit – torn jeans and a green hoodie – that she had been wearing for
Alchemy, astrology and medicine (before the triumph of germ theory): three worthless intellectual systems which provided a good living for many into the 18th century and even beyond. Alchemy turned into chemistry; astrology was divorced by astronomy; and medicine (which might have become Pasteurism or Listerism) somehow kept its old name while abandoning all its
Andrea Long Chu is the poster girl critic of the American progressive left. Writing primarily for New York magazine, she made her name with takedowns of celebrated novelists such as Hanya Yanagihara, Bret Easton Ellis and Zadie Smith. In 2023, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for reviews that ‘scrutinise authors as well as their
Every doctor can remember a time when bacterial infection laid waste to their patient with hair-raising speed and virulence. The most indelible for me occurred a decade ago during surgical night shifts. Again and again I was called to the bedside of a young woman with the ‘flesh-eating bug’, or necrotising fasciitis. By the time
Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches
At some point in the past ten years, trauma became a joke in my household. Should any Ditum suffer a minor mishap, the correct reaction is to adopt a wounded expression, bob your head to the side and whimper: ‘My trauma!’ Not because trauma is funny, but because what Darren McGarvey refers to as the
‘Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek: The story of a hero’s descent to the underworld.’ R.F. Kuang’s latest novel is a promising adventure story full of magic and maths but let down by florid prose. When Alice Law, an American postgraduate student of ‘Analytic Magick’ at Cambridge, learns of the death of her chauvinist thesis supervisor Professor
‘Artisan’ is now a word attached to coffee, candles, paper, clothes, rugs etc. It is used to raise prices by giving consumers a warm feeling of being pampered with the solid, ancient virtues of the handmade. It is, of course, a lie. If you want to know about Britain and yourself, read this book. James
In italics at the very end of the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joan Didion spills the beans: ‘Writers are always selling somebody out.’ It’s hard to improve on that, but we can at least specify that she had journalists in mind, not poets or novelists, though probably she looked on all scribblers with