John Sutherland

The cheerful manifesto of anti-ageism activist Ashton Applewhite

16 March 2019 9:00 am

Ashton Applewhite is a leading American ‘inspirer’ on how to make the most of being over the hill. She has…

How The Satanic Verses failed to burn

28 May 2016 9:00 am

This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if…

Michael Moorcock (Photo: Ulf Andersen/Getty)

Michael Moorcock’s ‘autobiography’

8 August 2015 9:00 am

Michael Moorcock has put his name to more books, pamphlets and fanzines than, probably, even Michael Moorcock can count, but…

Poirot won’t be drawn

The sad demise of the amateur sleuth: it’s all the fault of better policing

16 May 2015 9:00 am

‘The crime novel,’ said Bertolt Brecht, ‘like the world itself, is ruled by the English.’ He was thinking of the…

Lodge: the proof that aspiration does not mean surrendering the virtues of your class

David Lodge: confessions of a wrongly modest man

24 January 2015 9:00 am

This massive first instalment of a memoir starts in the quite good year the author was born, 1935, and ends…

Samuel Beckett in Paris in the 1970s

A Beckett fagend rescued from a bin

12 April 2014 9:00 am

Spectator readers of my vintage will remember their first encounter with Beckett as vividly as their first lover’s kiss. For…

The book that Boris should give to all seniors, along with their Freedom Passes

7 December 2013 9:00 am

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a story for the older reader. One might go so far as to suggest…

Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett - review

21 September 2013 9:00 am

In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…

Finn Dean

Looking at Books by John Sutherland - essay

27 July 2013 9:00 am

The sexy thing this summer, as the TV ads tell us, is the e-book. Forget those old 1,000-page blockbusters, two…