Books
The secrets of Dante’s marriage
Unlike Shakespeare, who kept himself out of all his works, except the Sonnets, Dante was endlessly reworking his autobiography, even…
Taking the Kamasutra seriously
The rough English translation of Kamasutra is pleasure (kama) treatise (sutra). In the West, since it was first (rather surreptitiously)…
Don DeLillo foresees the imminent death of death
Cults, the desert, natural disasters. Artists, bankers, terrorists. Cash machines, food packaging, secret installations. Mediaspeak and scientific jargon. Crowds and…
Pumped up and dangerous: going to war on drugs
‘Of all civilisation’s occupational categories, that of soldier may be the most conducive to regular drug use.’ The problem with…
Power slips from Gloriana’s jewelled fingers
If you’ve been watching Game of Thrones recently, you’ll have seen an old folkloric fantasy in which a bewitching young…
Lizzie Bennet is catapulted to America
Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Eligible is a page-turning romantic comedy which is very funny and entirely ridiculous: each of the short…
Ferdinand Mount picks out the plums nicely
Book reviews, John Updike once wrote, ‘perform a clear and desired social service: they excuse us from reading the books…
Teffi: from Russia with laughs
‘Ah! Scrubbing the deck! My childhood dream! As a child I had once seen a sailor hosing the deck with…
A Feelgood fairy story
When I wrote for the NME as a schoolgirl in the 1980s, it was recognised that there were musicians who…
Bedding down with the butler in Georgian Ireland
If you had the resources, Georgian Ireland must have been a very agreeable place in which to live. It was…
Books and arts opener
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‘The finest architectural delusion in the world’
It took the madness of genius to build such a wonderful impossibility. Patrick Marnham reviews a delightful new literary guide to Venice
Jeremy Thorpe gets off Scott-free
Appropriately for the dog days of British politics, there’s plenty of canine activity in this neatly groomed account of the…
The art critic who loved to provoke the Establishment
Richard Dorment doesn’t do whimsy. Or Stanley Spencer. He’s a fan of Cy Twombly and Brice Marden, Gilbert and George…
Disgusted of London - A.L. Kennedy's Serious Sweet reviewed
Twenty-four long hours, two lonely people, one city in decline. This is the premise of A.L. Kennedy’s new novel Serious…
‘Thou shalt commit adultery’
Jesuits, the leading apologists for Rome and Catholic revival in Elizabethan England, cast a long shadow over the paranoid post-Armada…
The deceptive charm of the bourgeoisie
Glimpsing the title of Lynsey Hanley’s absorbing new book as it fell out of the jiffy bag, I found myself…
Enver Hoxha: Stalin’s devilish disciple
In his final public appearance, the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha addressed a Tirana crowd to commemorate the capital’s liberation from…
T. rex: the greatest celebrity of all time
Tyrannosaurus rex is the greatest celebrity of all time. The 68–66 million-year-old carnivore is far older than any actor or…
Andrey Kurkov’s The Bickford Fuse is a satirical masterpiece
Whimsy, satire and deadpan humour: welcome to the world of Andrey Kurkov. If you know Kurkov’s work, The Bickford Fuse…
Florence's black Medici prince: a drama worthy of Shakespeare
The life – and violent death – of a very unusual Renaissance prince has Alex von Tunzelmann enthralled
A bleak future — without cabbages or kings
One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of…
Marina Lewycka’s Granny steals the show
Marina Lewycka’s latest happy-go-lucky tale of migrant folk in Britain takes a remark by the modernist architect Berthold Lubetkin as…
Steve Jones’s chaotic theory of history
‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad.’ Philip Larkin’s most famous line has appeared in the Spectator repeatedly, and…
How we went from mere betting to gaming the world
If I prang your car, we can swap insurance details. In the past, it would have been necessary for you…
