Books
Things fall apart
Ali Smith is that rare thing in Britain: a much-beloved experimental writer. Part of her attraction for readers is that…
A choice of first novels
Constellation by Adrien Bosc (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) picks nimbly along the divide between fiction and non-fiction. It’s really a speculative…
Up where the air is clear
Robert Twigger’s father was born in a Himalayan hill resort and carried to school in a sedan chair. His son,…
Evgeny Lebedev: Organising my theatre awards makes Brexit look easy
The new government seems to be struggling with the logistical intricacies of removing Britain from the European Union. I can…
Letter from the Caribbean #2
Jonathan Ray gets his head around how to create the perfect rum cocktail. I’ve lost count of the number of…
Letter from the Caribbean #1
Jonathan Ray gets a taste for rum but knows when it’s time to stop. Excitement in the Caribbean concerning Prince…
Obituary: Eric Christiansen
Over the past year, we have lost two names cherished by Spectator readers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic for 20…
How to solve the engineering skills crisis
UK engineering is facing an insidious threat to its success – a chronic failure to get enough young people to…
Worse than Big Brother
The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the…
No one turned a hair
The Benson family was one of the most extraordinary of Victorian England, and they certainly made sure that we have…
A very special relationship
You learn startling things about the long entanglement of the British with Spain on every page of Simon Courtauld’s absorbing…
Fine silks and fiery curries
Genial, erudite and companionable over most of its 760 pages, this stout Georgian brick of a neighbourhood history at length…
Weird and wonderful
The Un-Discovered Islands could not be more different in substance — though it is similar in style — to Malachy…
Between pony club and the altar
If you were to take a large dragnet and scoop up all the shoppers in the haberdashery department of Peter…
Figures in a landscape
Timothy Hyman’s remarkable new book makes the case for the relevance of figurative painting in the 20th century, a period…
Soldiers of the Queen
It’s not immediately obvious, but the silhouette on the dust jacket — soldiers advancing in single file, on foot (‘boots…
The milk of human kindness
One of David Cameron’s choices on Desert Island Discs, this book reminds us, was ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the…
Surreal parables
There is a common assumption that experimental writing — for want of a better term — is obscure, joyless and…
Books of the year
Craig Raine Philip Hancock’s pamphlet of poems Just Help Yourself (Smiths Knoll, £5): charming, authentic, trim reports from the…
Cover 12 November 2016
http://www.spectator.co.uk/content/uploads/2016/11/planettrump.mp3 The post Cover 12 November 2016 appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion and…
Blind tasting
In my line of work, I’m lucky enough to go to a lot of wine tastings – press tastings that…
Email Marketing Manager
Job description An exciting new role has emerged at The Spectator magazine, one of the UK’s oldest, yet rapidly growing…
Divinely decadent
‘Oh the Mediterranean addiction, how we fall for it!’ So sighed Sybille Bedford, who spent the 1920s and 1930s in…
Magnetic and repellent
When he first came to public notice, Rasputin was described in a Russian newspaper as ‘a symbol. He is not…
When greed became good
We financial hacks have been encouraged, indoctrinated perhaps, to think that London’s Big Bang was a Very Good Thing. That…
