Books
Rows backstage at the National Theatre
It is, proclaimed Charles Wyndham in 1908, ‘an institution alien to the spirit of our nation’. The alien having long…
![Marie Colvin, a year before her death. [Rex Features]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Marie_Colvin.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
For Marie Colvin, mortal danger was what made life worth living
When Britain finally lowered the flag in the Iraqi city of Basra in 2007, the army’s top brass valiantly claimed…
How The West was run
There aren’t many histories or biographies written by Australians that sociologists and anthropologists will turn to in the future in…
Australian liberalisms
David Kemp’s first of five volumes in the history of Australian liberalism, The Land of Dreams, How Australians Won Their…
Books of the year – part two
Daniel Swift I feel as though I came late to the Sarah Moss party. Nobody told me she was this…
Saul Bellow: love the work, if not the man
Boxing writers sometimes try to make comparisons across weight groups. They used to say, for example, that Floyd Mayweather was…
Does an autobiographical novel really count as fiction?
Orhan Pamuk, writing about Vladimir Nabokov’s masterful memoir Speak, Memory, noted that there was a particular ‘thrill’ for the writer…
The Lion of the Punjab: the short, brutish career of John Nicholson
‘I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion’, said Winston Churchill as prime minister in 1942,…
Top topiary: the year’s best gardening books
There are probably no more gifted professional gardeners in England than Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain, husband and wife and…
Dreams of utopia before the Nazi nightmare
Today Munich is a prosperous and peaceful place — Germany’s most affluent, attractive city. Wandering its leafy avenues, lined with…
What was the celebrated Garrick really like as an actor?
The age of Garrick, Norman Poser, a law professor, insists, gave us much of what we take for granted today…
Japanese puzzle: how can an advanced, dynamic country function with such an ancient population?
When Japan hosts the Rugby Union World Cup next year, and still more so the summer Olympics in 2020, all…
Flexing China’s muscles
We live in interesting times. And, according to Taylor, a respected academic from the Australian National University specialising in geopolitics,…
Books of the year – part one
Andrew Motion Short stories seem to fare better in the US than the UK, and among this year’s rich crop,…
Celebrating the 1918 Armistice resulted in thousands more deaths
Reflecting on the scenes of celebration, the ‘overpowering entrancements’, that he had witnessed in November 1918 on the first Armistice…
Boys’ Own adventures in the war-torn Middle East
Ask most people whether they fancy a four-month, 5,000-mile trek across the Middle East and they might conclude you need…
Baron Haussmann: the man who set Paris straight
Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera…
Unfolding mysteries: the drama of drapery in Italian art
The striking yet subtle jacket image from Donatello’s ‘Madonna of the Clouds’ announces this book’s quality from the outset. Its…
Farewell to cricket as the archetypal English game
At the beginning of August this year, the England test team played what is supposed to have been the 1,000th…
The Statue of Liberty is a deeply sinister icon
Immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century discovered in Upper New York Bay, after a long, uncomfortable…
The Victorian melodrama that led to murder and mayhem
Early on the morning of 6 May 1840, a young housemaid in a respectable Mayfair street discovered that her master,…
The ancient Greeks would have loved Alexa
Among the myths of Ancient Greece the Cyclops has become forever famous, the Talos not so much. While both were…
A darkly comic road trip: The Remainder, by Alia Trabucco Zerán, reviewed
You could call The Remainder a literary kaleidoscope: look at it one way and you see how the past lays…
But does it pass the breath, er, pub test?
Anne Summers in 2011 was named by Vogue magazine as ‘one of the world’s wisest women’. After reading her memoir…
Germaine Greer continues to shock and awe
There is an African bird called the ox-pecker with which Germaine Greer, conversant as she is with the natural world,…
