Books
First Day of Spring in Bath
Quick-flowing creamy light and all cohering: Faux fanes in gardens, Nash and Wesley’s shades, Gold, gaily weighty houses, rocketing sky,…
Title Stories: Utopia by Thomas More
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Books and arts
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Matthew Parris on Owen Jones, Alan Johnson on hawks, David Crane on Noah’s Flood: Spectator books of the year
A further selection of the best and most overrated books of 2014, chosen by some of our regular reviewers
Stefan Zweig: the tragedy of a great bad writer
Stefan Zweig wasn’t, to be honest, a very good writer. This delicious fact was hugged to themselves by most of…
Scotland’s miraculous century (it started with the Union)
In 1707 Scotland surrendered what it had of its independence by the Treaty of Union with England. That independence had…
Elizabeth I, queen of the waiting game
Women are ‘foolish, wanton flibbergibs, in every way doltified with the dregs of the devil’s dunghill’. So a cleric reminded…
The 10 best loo books of 2014: why we sing so much better in the shower and what became of Queen Victoria’s children’s milk teeth
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Songs for the road: through his music and his classic car collection Neil Young hopes to escape his childhood traumas
Why do people talk about ‘experimenting’ with drugs when mostly they just mean that they’re doing them? Perhaps, as I…
Did anyone ever really love Bob Hope?
Why does everything these days have to be a superlative? Why must writers scream for our attention, yelling that the…
The Anonymous ghost in the machine
Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
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Emmanuel Carrère: a poet and psychopath doing his best to further destabilise Ukraine
If Eduard Limonov, the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s utterly engrossing biographical ‘novel’, hadn’t invented himself, Carrère would have had to…
Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home
Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s —…
Is there anything new left in gardening books?
‘Whither the novel’ was a great dinner party topic in the 1960s. It is a question less aired these days,…
Is France now the sick man of Europe? It is if it’s taking Eric Zemmour seriously
Graham Robb on the book currently taking France by storm
The Duke of Wellington also invades Christmas art books
Art books fall naturally into various categories, of which the most common is probably the monograph. Judith Zilczer’s A Way…
God, aliens and a novel with a mission
They say never work with children and animals. They could just as well say don’t write about aliens and God.…
Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
An armchair voyeur gets a glimpse into Nicky Haslam’s vast address book
Phaidon pioneered the modern art-book in 1936. The formula was: large format, fine production, exceptional plates, and essays by the…
It’s the Stupid, stupid
Ironic Capitalisation of That Which You Do Not Like is apparently A Thing. You’ll forgive me for employing this Irritating…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
A choice of humorous books
Nancy Mitford would not call them ‘toilet books’, that’s for certain. Loo books? Lavatory books? One or two people I…
Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov
The post Title Stories: The Seagull by Anton Chekhov appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…
Everything is merde
For the Figaro journalist and TV commentator Eric Zemmour, whose Le Suicide français has been topping the bestseller lists in…
