Books
Books and arts
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Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera
Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn…
Gloriana and the Sultan — England’s unlikely alliance
The idea for a mechanical cock was never going to work. In 1595 the English ambassador to Constantinople, Edward Barton,…
Death and retribution in Beersheba
Nordic noir is passé. Now we have Israeli noir. Waking Lions is a mordant thriller written by a clinical psychologist…
POOF... BOOM... POW! Daniel Clowes’s new graphic novel descends into magic
If you could travel back in time, would you kill Hitler’s mother, seek out your old house and play ball…
South Africa’s Heart of Darkness
Trencherman was first published in Afrikaans in 2006 and translated into English for a South African readership shortly afterwards, but…
George Bell: witness to the truth
George Bell (1883–1958) was, in many respects, a typical Anglican prelate of his era. He went to Westminster and Christ…
Let there be light
There has been extraordinarily little bright sunlight in the far northwest corner of Britain over the past year. Damp, drizzling…
Was 1971 really the best ever year for music?
According to David Hepworth, the year he turned 21 was also the year when ‘a huge proportion of the most…
The making of modern India
The sacrifices made by India on the Allies’ behalf in the second world war would profoundly affect the country’s future for better or worse, says Philip Hensher
How to have your cake — and not eat it
Sitting at her desk at the BBC in March 2006, researching a documentary about the Olympic Games, Caroline Jones pressed…
The 1850s: a dizzying decade of boom and bust
We can all identify decades in which the world moved forward. Wars are not entirely negative experiences: the social and…
Big names and broken souls: storm clouds gather over Woodstock’s summer of love
In 1963, when the bloom was still on the rose, Bob Dylan described Woodstock as a place where ‘we stop…
Hot Milk’s heroine has snaky curls and a basilisk stare
With ‘both arms stretched out like a starfish, her long hair floating like seaweed at the sides of her body’,…
Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen reminds me of Nabokov
Eileen is an accomplished, disturbing and creepily funny first novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, the latest darling of the Paris Review,…
Sexy selfies through the ages
At nearly eight foot high and five foot wide, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s portrait of herself with two of her students is…
The Litvinenko case: Mayfair murder most foul
On 1 November 2006 Alexander Litvinenko, ex-KGB officer and by then a British citizen, met two of his former colleagues,…
Modern Italy’s heart of darkness
Valerio Varesi, the Turin-born crime writer, displays a typically Italian interest (I would say) in conspiracy theory. The Italian term…
New light on the Sun
The Sun is a star that many astronomers assume is only worth studying because of its averageness; it’s middle-aged and…
How to Measure a Cow — and escape the shadows of the past
Margaret Forster, who died on 8 February, excelled at writing about complex relationships between women. Even old friends, she demonstrated,…
A Girl in Exile: Ismail Kadare’s novel is full of absence
My last review for The Spectator was of Julian Barnes’s biographical novel about Shostakovitch. A Girl in Exile also depicts…
Following Jesus’s followers
In his new book Apostle Tom Bissell has an advantage over writers who go looking for Jesus: he can start…
Books & arts
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God’s children
Once upon a time, Christianity in Australia was seen as the One True Faith. These days, it is likely to…
Gifts from beyond the grave — from Virgil and Seamus Heaney
Andrew Motion finds a touching parallel between Virgil’s unfinished Aeneid and Seamus Heaney’s barely finished translation of Book VI
