The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
The telephone rang and it was Mark Amory, literary editor of this magazine. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he asked me to review Beautiful Chickens. I said yes at once. I already had a copy of the book, given me by the staff at Heywood Hill as a Christmas present,
With a new novel each year, Robert Edric cannot have much time for courting London’s literary establishment, but does he stay at home in East Yorkshire? The London Satyr is set in 1890s London and to me, a Londoner, it seems not merely researched but felt, as if its author has tramped the streets and
John Farndon has written the Bookend column in this week’s issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of the book blog. Below the thunders of the upper deep, Far far beneath in the abysmal sea, His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep The Kraken sleepeth . . . wrote Tennyson in his sonnet about the
Ring the bells for a very famous popular historian. Niall Ferguson latest book, Civilisation: the West and Rest, was published yesterday and it is this month’s Spectator book club book of the month. (The accompanying TV series begins on Sunday) Already the book is being debated. Ferguson has long had his detractors in academia –
Few things are more intriguing than an unfinished novel. With fitting symmetry, two books have been published posthumously in the past two years: Nabokov’s The Original Laura and Jose Saramango’s Cain. This year, Little Brown is to publish The Pale King, an unfinished work by David Foster Wallace – a claimant to the title of
In a recent review of Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, Robert Macfarlane remarks that the English scrubland between town and countryside is a theme that seems currently to be occupying the national consciousness. The border country that this book describes is the territory which people pass through on their way to other places; the
Roger Scruton is a man who has found himself condemned for defending the right things in the wrong way. Love, home, happiness and justice are the overriding concerns of his work, but his arguments about how we can achieve them have been repeatedly damned as mad and dangerous by those kind enough to appoint themselves
John Aubrey was at his most vivacious when describing the cavaliers of his era. ‘A gallant in an age of the lewdest bawdy,’ he wrote of Lucius Carey with ill-disguised pleasure. These men were rogues like Rochester, Lovelace and Herrick – broke, drunk and invariably syphilitic. They were also royalists, a licentious contrast to their
Nancy Drew, the timeless teenage girl’s classic, has gone digital. Will the Famous Five be joining her in the 21st Century? Time’s Techland column reports: ‘The Nancy Drew series might have been around for 80 years, but that doesn’t mean that the art of the mystery novel is outdated. Her Interactive has updated the fan
Jerry Hayes, the former Conservative MP for Harlow and criminal Barrister, returns to The Spectator Arts Blog with his take on Janet Street Porter’s book Don’t Let The B*****ds Get You Down, which has recently been reprinted in paperback. You really won’t want to put this book down. Because the moment the first page of
For the first 17 days of their ordeal, the Chilean miners trapped underground last year were forced to ration themselves to one sliver of tuna every 36 hours. Less than a month later, while still down the mine but after rescuers had secured them regular food supplies, they threatened to go on hunger strike. Such
Why, the energetic historian Niall Ferguson asks in his new book, did a minority of people stuck out on the extreme western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the world in cultural, political and economic terms for more than half a millennium? This, he says, ‘seems to me the most interesting question a
Branko Milanovic is the lead economist at the World Bank’s research department, a professor at the University of Maryland and a grand fromage at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace too. Branko Milanovic is the lead economist at the World Bank’s research department, a professor at the University of Maryland and a grand fromage at
Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing, loss, and of how Jews attempt to cope with the destruction that characterises their history. The title refers to the Book of Kings: ‘All the
Among the many photographs in this comprehensive history is one of a master in a clerical collar. He stares at the camera with a startled expression and looks out of place, devoid of the self-assurance of others alongside him. His name is J. W. Coke Norris, and it dawned on me slowly that this was
When King Abdullah first started work on this political memoir two years ago, he can hardly have imagined how different the Middle East would look by the time of its publication. Change in this region, which prizes stability above all else, mostly occurs at a glacial pace, if it happens at all. Yet the region
A monsoon of literature will eventually be written about the WikiLeaks story. Here are two of the first droplets. David Leigh and Luke Harding have delivered an enjoyable account of the Guardian’s fraught dealings with Julian Assange and the publication of the secret US cables. The WikiLeaks founder comes across as a shadowy, manipulative character
Mark Mason has written the Bookends column in this week’s issue of magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. For the first 17 days of their ordeal, the Chilean miners trapped underground last year were forced to ration themselves to one sliver of tuna every 36 hours. Less than a month later, while
‘The more identities a man has, the more they express the man they conceal.’ For me, that sentence indicates why John Le Carré is one of Britain’s greatest living writers. It’s elegant, profound and accessible. It comes from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and that story of betrayals is contained in that one sentence. In fact,
Here, as promised, is Sam Leith’s magazine review of Niall Ferguson’s new book Civilisation: the West and the Rest. Why, the energetic historian Niall Ferguson asks in his new book, did a minority of people stuck out on the extreme western end of the Eurasian landmass come to dominate the world in cultural, political and
The BBC’s Books season started in earnest this week. And, so far at least, my earlier optimism has not been shaken. My Life in Books, the new daily literary chat show with Anne Robinson at the helm, launched on Monday at 6:30 on BBC2. P.D. James and Richard Bacon, an unlikely pairing if ever there
For a long time, one of my favourite radio programmes has been Something Understood, presented by Mark Tully on BBC Radio 4. For those who have never tuned in for its Sunday evening slot, the format is as follows: each week Tully presents a selection of literary and musical extracts all connected by a one-word
The books have ended, the final film instalment is in the can and the recent valedictory Bafta was collected en masse by cast and crew. But still more, apparently, can be squeezed from the Harry Potter franchise. A Guardian article last week reported that J.K. Rowling is to be the subject of a straight-to-TV biopic
Niall Ferguson is among Britain’s most valuable exports – a feted international academic with seats at Harvard, Stanford, the Harvard Business School and the LSE; he has also had spells at Oxford and Cambridge. His tomes sell in their millions; his TV shows are an engaging mix of self-confidence and charm. He is a credible
Until the start of the twentieth century, Thomas Traherne was completely unknown. Very little of his writing had ever been published, and even less had been widely read. Over the last one hundred years, however, several manuscripts of his works have been discovered, often in dramatic circumstances (one was pulled from off a fire and
Ian McEwan accepted the Jerusalem Prize from Israeli President Shimon Peres and the Guardian reports that he used the ceremony to launch an incisive critique of Israel’s domestic policy, branding it a ‘great injustice’. In fact that’s barely half the story. McEwan was balanced: he unequivocally denigrated the ‘nihilism of the suicide bomber and the
What Makes Us Tick? The Ten Desires That Drive Us By Hugh Mackay Hachette, $35, pp 319 ISBN 9780733625077 Hugh Mackay has been studying Australian society for more than three decades, and has a number of interesting books and reports under his belt. What Makes Us Tick? is presented as a distillation of what he
Nora Ephron has a clever solution to a particular social quandary. Whenever she pinches her husband’s arm at a party, it’s their agreed signal for ‘I’ve forgotten the name of this person I have to introduce you to, so give them your name directly and they’ll respond in kind’. Only one problem — his memory
Why do you write? The question is sometimes posed by interviewers or by members of the audience at book festivals. My answer is usually rather feeble. ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I can’t sing or play a musical instrument or dance, and I can’t draw. So what else is left to me but writing?’ This is true