Books

Is America headed for tyranny? It is when the other side's in charge...

23 August 2014 9:00 am

For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is…

80 sq yds per gallon

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…

Portrait of Thomas Cromwell wearing ‘the George’, by Hans Holbein

Thomas Cromwell: more Tony Soprano than Richard Dawkins

23 August 2014 9:00 am

The travel writer Colin Thubron once told me that to understand a country and its people he first asks, ‘What…

A novel that will make you want to call social services

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Nina Stibbe has a way with children. Her first book, a memoir, was a deceptively wide-eyed view of a literary…

Coco Chanel, one of the ‘rackety celebrities’ of the 1920s, with Duke Laurino of Rome on the Lido

A Hello! magazine history of Venice

23 August 2014 9:00 am

When Napoleon Bonaparte captured Venice in 1797, he extinguished what had been the most successful regime in the history of…

Sorbet with Rimbaud

23 August 2014 9:00 am

The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…

Peter and Ian Fleming as boys at Joyce Grove (Peter is on the left)

Ian Fleming: cruel? Selfish? Misogynistic? Nonsense, says his step-daughter

23 August 2014 9:00 am

Between the brothers Peter and Ian Fleming, Fionn Morgan wonders who was the better writer and who the better man

Stalin's Spanish bezzie

23 August 2014 9:00 am

During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the…

Title Stories: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

23 August 2014 9:00 am

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The colonel and the commander

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

7 August 1964 4 Old Mitre Court, EC4 Darling Fifi, A thousand thanks for your sweet letter & for Heaven’s…

80 sq yds per gallon

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…

Title Stories: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

The post Title Stories: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…

Peter and Ian Fleming as boys at Joyce Grove (Peter is on the left)

The colonel and the commander

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

7 August 1964 4 Old Mitre Court, EC4 Darling Fifi, A thousand thanks for your sweet letter & for Heaven’s…

80 sq yds per gallon

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

Nothing brings him to the door quite as surely as Silexine Watertight, the complete waterproofer. One Imperial Quart. Opened this…

Title Stories: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

21 August 2014 1:00 pm

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

Charles Scott Moncrieff (left) had a deep personal affinity with Proust (right). His rendering of 'À La Recherche du Temps Perdu' is considered one of the greatest literary translations of all time

Soldier, poet, lover, spy: just the man to translate Proust

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Sam Leith is astonished by how much the multi-talented Charles Scott Moncrieff achieved in his short lifetime

‘While some observers were impressed, others felt the depiction of a doddery Churchill propped up on a walking stick unbecoming’

The lost Victorian who sculpted Churchill

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few…

The Zone of Interest is grubby, creepy – and Martin Amis's best for 25 years

16 August 2014 9:00 am

‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he…

The ring-necked parakeet, one of the most successful birds to colonise London, still looks conspicuously out of place in Hyde Park in the snow

What's eating London's songbirds?

16 August 2014 9:00 am

This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity,…

Chris Barber should let someone meaner tell his story

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on…

Fifty years of Inspector Wexford – and a new detective on the block

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Early on in The Girl Next Door, Ruth Rendell gives the reader a sharp nudge. ‘Colin Quell had very little…

Title Stories: Winnie The Pooh by A.A. Milne

16 August 2014 9:00 am

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One Afternoon

16 August 2014 9:00 am

In Aljezur we took a walk And paused above the river where, Among the rushes, swifts and fish, We saw…

A Siberian exile prepares to shoot a black fox (c.1819)

Siberia beyond the Gulag Archipelago

16 August 2014 9:00 am

Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and…

Nation-builders on a sticky wicket: the farce and heroism of Pakistani cricket

16 August 2014 9:00 am

There is farce in Peter Oborne’s history of cricket in Pakistan. An impossible umpire is abducted by drunken English tourists…