Books
Mario Reading reviews four first-rate first novels
It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure…
R.W. Johnson: 40-odd years prophesying the end for South Africa
I think this should begin with a truth-in-journalism disclosure: I know R.W. Johnson well enough to call him Bill. Since…
The trials of living with a High Court judge
This intensely written memoir by Adam Mars-Jones about his Welsh father, Sir William, opens with the death of Sheila, Adam’s…
A Gothic horror story of quicksands, riptides and rituals
This is a muddle of novel (originally published last year by Tartarus Press in a limited edition), though there are…
Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
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Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
Gnats
after Robert Hooke, Micrographia (1665) Their world is a glass of rainwater. They move up and down through the clearness,…
Physicists have stranger ideas than the most preposterous Old Testament preacher
The beliefs of physicists are infinitely kookier than anything in the Bible, says Alexander Masters
Chairman Mao: monster of misrule
Mao Zedong, once the Helmsman, Great Teacher and Red Red Sun in Our Hearts, and still the Chairman, died in…
Matilda Bathurst chooses the best recent short story collections
‘I just wanted the damn story to ask the right questions,’ sighs a disaffected journalist in Jack Livings’s debut collection…
From ragtime to the X Factor: the epic story of popular music
As pop music drifts away from many people’s lives, so its literature grows ever more serious and weighty, as though…
‘Doorways to the unknown’: Clive James’s Latest Readings
In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks…
The revolution that went up in smoke
‘Every day’, writes the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson in this account of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, ‘see-sawed between joy and…
The road to Lolita: why Nabokov’s literary talent finally blossomed in America
Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov’s nostalgic memoir, reflects on his life from the age of three to 41, taking us from…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
How to get a good education — from the former headmaster of Eton
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education is Tony Little’s valedictory meditation on his profession, published on his retirement as headmaster…
![Portrait of Pepys, after John Hayls. The Diary for 17 March 1666 reads: ‘This day I begin to sit [for Hayls], and he will make me, I think, a very fine picture.... I sit to have it full of shadows, and do almost break my neck looking over my shoulder to make the posture for him to work by.’](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/pepys1.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
The joy of an unexpurgated Pepys — without the bother of reading it oneself
We all know about Samuel Pepys witnessing the Great Fire in his Diaries, but how many have read the definitive…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
Elysium
The best time is the summer time When cow parsley is high, And daylight hours of field flowers Are spread…
The old-fashioned greatness of Christian Thielemann
Philip Hensher admires an old-fashioned conductor who unashamedly favours the great German composers — and Wagner in particular
A remote island community is disrupted by the arrival of a troubled teenager
Benjamin Wood’s first novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was published in 2012, picked up good reviews, was shortlisted for the Costa…
August
The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The…
Jonathan Galassi’s fictional poet made me doubt my knowledge of American literature
Jonathan Galassi is an American publisher, poet and translator. In his debut novel Muse, his passion for the ‘good old…
Rediscover the venerable father of English history
It might seem to some a bold move to base a book on any kind of journey at all when…
