Books
Our islands’ story
Britain has 6,000 islands. Not as many as Sweden’s 30,000 but quite enough to be going on with. Only 132…
Tales out of school
In 1952, the five-year-old Michael Rosen and his brother were taken on holiday along the Thames by their communist parents.…
Wandering Jews
Simon Schama is an international treasure. Whether on screen or in print, he is all energy, enthusiasm, dramatic gestures, emotional…
Having your cake
For those in the know, Jimmy Webb is one of the great pop songwriters of the 1960s and 70s, up…
Trials and Trinitarians
John Calvin believed that human nature was a ‘permanent factory of idols’; the mind conceived them, and the hand gave…
Apostle of gloom
Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…
Ratings war
Planning for the ‘war of the future’ is something generals and politicians have been doing for the past 150 years.…
Going places
Stations, according to Simon Jenkins, are the forgotten part of the railway experience. People love the trains, the journey, the…
Portraits of Pakistan
By his own admission, Isambard Wilkinson’s memoir of his experiences in Pakistan a decade ago as a foreign correspondent has…
Brotherly love
Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the…
Alice’s restaurant
Though Alice Waters is not a household name here, that is precisely what she is in America — the best-known…
Of his time
Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If…
Learning to talk
One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…
Deep learning
Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…
Harsh, but entertaining
When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…
The cult of Holy Bob
The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…
The hunger
In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…
Muddled in minutiae
‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…
Demonised by history
Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…
Britain über alles
David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…
Ruck ‘n roll
As every Speccie reader certainly will be aware and no doubt heartily applaud, the game of rugby league was born…
A game of cat-and-mouse
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive,…
True grit
As literary editor of the Sunday Times in the early 1980s, when the rest of the editorial staff routinely papered…
Raising Cain
It is a pretty safe bet that for every 1,000 people who know of William Wilberforce, no more than the…
Folk-tale redux
Daniel and his big sister, Cathy, do not go to school. They live with their father, a gargantuan former prizefighter,…
