The Spectator

Friday

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The week in books – a 19th century career woman, the courtesan of the camellias, Vasily Grossman and why France is turning into the USA

The forecast is bad. Football is back. Gloom strikes. Cure the malaise by reading the book reviews in this week’s Spectator. Here’s a selection: Richard Davenport-Hines introduces the celebrated American novelist and businesswoman Willa Cather to a British audience: ‘Cather was a pioneering career woman who in the late 1890s supported herself as a magazine editor

Thursday

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penguin

‘Flying fish. Flying foxes. Birds, bats… You really like killing things that fly, don’t you?’

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Outcasts

‘Apparently some of our pupils were born in wedlock. We must do all we can to ensure they’re not treated as outcasts.’

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This is no way to run a railway

We would not want to return to the days when the transport secretary was actively engaged in the running of the railways, down to what the last wheel-tapper was paid. Nevertheless, Patrick McLoughlin’s answer when invited to condemn the £5 million bonuses which could be on offer to Network Rail directors over the next three

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Letters: James Whitaker’s widow answers Toby Young

Absent friends Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks

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Portrait of the week | 15 August 2013

Home The population of the United Kingdom rose by 420,000, to 63.7 million, by the middle of last year, with the number of births, 813,000 (more than a quarter to mothers born abroad), being the highest since 1972. Thames Water asked the regulator Ofwat to allow it to impose a 12 per cent increase on