Books
The story of Sikkim’s last king and queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong
Sikkim was a Himalayan kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India, Nepal and Bhutan. I…
A broad farce about banking’s dirty secrets in post-Celtic-Tiger Dublin
It’s not Paul Murray’s settings or themes — decadent aristocrats, clerical sex abuse, the financial crisis — that mark him…
For your own good
I grew up queer in Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland. Bjelke-Petersen was populist, racist, and religious: he hated socialism, but the Queensland of…
Britain didn’t fight the second world war — the British empire did
Had it not been for the empire, Britain might have lost the second world war, says William Dalrymple. The war certainly lost Britain the empire
The opposite of a self-help book
At last, a snappy pop philosophy book which offers to sort out absolutely none of your personal issues. If anything,…
Helen Vendler is full of condescending waffle (and not just when she’s attacking me)
Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there…
Bletchley Park was decades ahead of Silicon Valley. So what happened?
Gordon Corera, best known as the security correspondent for BBC News, somehow finds time to write authoritative, well-researched and readable…
Last day
None of the teachers who taught us were around that final afternoon at Grammar school — probably frightened of being…
Rory McEwen: man of many talents — and among the greatest of all flower painters
It seems odd that a singer, musician, television performer and sculptor who typified the 1960s as vividly as Rory McEwen…
Harry’s Homer — a humorous history
It was a certain unforgettable ex-girlfriend, Harry Mount confesses — named only as ‘S’ in his dedication — who came…
A crime novel so incompetent it might have been written by a child
First, a quote from the novel under review. The context: it is a flashback scene of the behaviour of a…
William Waldegrave: too nice ever to have been PM
‘Lobbying,’ writes William Waldegrave in this extraordinary memoir, ‘takes many forms.’ But he has surely reported a variant hitherto unrecorded…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Last day
None of the teachers who taught us were around that final afternoon at Grammar school — probably frightened of being…
Amanda
When I didn’t recognise the number and saw the text with kisses, but no name — ‘Thinking of you: they’re…
Last day
None of the teachers who taught us were around that final afternoon at Grammar school — probably frightened of being…
Go Set a Watchman should never have been hyped as a ‘landmark new novel’, says Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher on the tangled history of To Kill a Mockingbird’s much-anticipated ‘sequel’
Love nest or den of iniquity? Cliveden has always been shrouded in mystery and scandal
Well, you can’t say he wasn’t warned. Swimming pools, Nancy Astor told her son, Bill, were ‘disgustin’. I don’t trust…
Welcome to the world of Big Byz
The title of Victor Pelevin’s 2011 novel stands for ‘Special Newsreel/Universal Feature Film’. This product is made by the narrator,…
Rich, thin and selfish in Manhattan
The scene: a funeral parlour in New York. Doors clang as a family relative, the ‘black sheep’, saunters in halfway…
Mission near impossible
Operation Thunderbolt was, Saul David contends in this gripping book, ‘the most audacious special forces operation in history’. In June…
France’s favourite bedtime story: a sanitised version of the French Revolution
The great conundrum of French history is the French Revolution, or rather, the sequence of revolutions, coups and insurrections during…
Anyone for eel-pulling?
Scholarship for its own sake has rather gone out of fashion, although I’m sure Spectator readers would be the last…
Spain’s golden age — with a silver lining
As every schoolboy knows, ‘the empire on which the sun never set’ was British, and ‘blue-blooded’ was a phrase applied…
