Books

What Hanif Kureishi learned from being robbed by his accountant

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Have you ever met a sane accountant? I ask, because one of the more striking sentences in A Theft runs:…

Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has…

Title Stories: The Woman in White

6 December 2014 9:00 am

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An alternative map of Britain: caves, canals, megaliths and ley lines

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Picture the map of Britain. Its strangely cadaverous shape, blobs of population and routes between them seem as familiar as…

What makes mankind behave so atrociously? Ian Buruma and Joanna Bourke investigate

6 December 2014 9:00 am

The first interaction between two men recorded in the Bible involves a murder. In the earliest classic of English literature,…

Goodwill to Men

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Overheard in advent was this complaint of a bus driver to a passenger, ‘Don’t call me brother! We’re not of…

Deng Xiaoping: following in Mao’s footsteps

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Much has been written about Deng Xiao-ping (1904–1997), most recently by Ezra Vogel in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of…

As No Art Is

6 December 2014 9:00 am

The weekend’s on us, and no means of soothing it or kissing it away. The flat facades of mansion blocks…

Even Cilla’s biographer admits that critics were justified in knocking the ‘prurience ‘of Blind Date

Five of the best celebrity biographies of 2014

6 December 2014 9:00 am

Cilla Black has become a strange creature during her 50 years in showbiz. When her husband Bobby was in hospital…

‘The Tempest’, about 1862, by Peder Balke

Books and arts

6 December 2014 9:00 am

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As No Art Is

4 December 2014 2:30 pm

The weekend’s on us, and no means of soothing it or kissing it away. The flat facades of mansion blocks…

Goodwill to Men

4 December 2014 2:30 pm

Overheard in advent was this complaint of a bus driver to a passenger, ‘Don’t call me brother! We’re not of…

Title Stories: The Woman in White

4 December 2014 2:30 pm

The post Title Stories: The Woman in White appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion…

Goodwill to Men

4 December 2014 2:30 pm

Overheard in advent was this complaint of a bus driver to a passenger, ‘Don’t call me brother! We’re not of…

Title Stories: The Woman in White

4 December 2014 2:30 pm

Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.

‘Fascinating Rhythm’, 1982–3, by Allen Jones

Books and arts

29 November 2014 9:00 am

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Eugene O’Neill with his last wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, who safeguarded him, and enabled him to write his later plays, though friends and family considered her his jailer

Eugene O’Neill: the dark genius of American theatre

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Sarah Churchwell on how Eugene O’Neill virtually single-handedly revolutionised American theatre in the first half of the 20th century

How did English football get so ugly?

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Bill Shankly, the manager of Liverpool FC in the club’s halcyon days of the1960s and 1970s, once said: ‘Football isn’t…

Jerry Lee Lewis: interrogating ‘The Killer’

29 November 2014 9:00 am

‘I ain’t never pretended to be anything,’ says the man they call the Killer. ‘I’ve lived my life to the…

The Parent Trap, familiar from various film versions, is a story by Eric Kastner, now republished with Walter Trier’s illustrations by Pushkin Books

The best children’s books of 2014

29 November 2014 9:00 am

If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me…

Composer, conductor, author, pianist, lecturer — was there anything Leonard Bernstein couldn’t do?

29 November 2014 9:00 am

On 17 May 1969 Leonard Bernstein ended his 12-year run as musical director of the New York Philharmonic with a…

A mouth-watering selection: 2014’s best eight cookery books

29 November 2014 9:00 am

The people behind the people are the ones to watch for, and we have all been waiting for a book…

A brief, witty look at the coming of the e-book

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Paul Fournel is a novelist, former publisher and French cultural attaché in London, and the provisionally definitive secretary and president…

Drummers at a graveside wear white, based on Ethiopian orthodox funeral traditions

Death wears bling: the glory of London’s Caribbean funerals

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic…

The book that made me (almost) believe in bitcoin

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Bitcoins are digital money ‘mined’ from satanically difficult mathematical problems. Madness, obviously. But five years ago, while the rest of…