Crossed swords and pistols at dawn: the duel in literature
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Oscar Wilde and the marvellous boy
The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The…
Sunday roasts and beaded bubbles: dining with the poets
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions
There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is…
The opéra bouffe that was the Bretton Woods conference
There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret,…
What E.M. Forster didn't do
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
Critics can be creative - look at Malcolm Cowley
Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James…
What would Auden have deemed evil in our time? European jingoism
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
The Rothschilds, the Spenders, the Queen...
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and…
Colette’s France, by Jane Gilmour - review
Richard Davenport-Hines on the charmed, dizzy world of the multi-talented Colette
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood - review
The two opening volumes of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy have sold over a million copies. One of them managed to be…
The Selected Letters of Willa Cather, edited by Andrew Jewell - review
Richard Davenport-Hines on the tomboy from Red Cloud whose evocation of the vast, unforgiving landscape of the prairies is unrivalled
