Books
Sabina Spielrein: from psychiatric patient to psychoanalyst
Sabina Spielrein was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst with groundbreaking ideas about the role of the reproductive drive in human psychology…
The darkest secret about commuting: some of us enjoy it
In the early days of Victorian railways, train journeys were (rightly) considered so dangerous that ticket offices sold life insurance…
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,…
Shock jock
A senior Minister in the NSW government of John Fahey once told me that there was a vacant metaphorical chair…
Children’s books for Christmas
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me…
Language
And when I landed in America, aged ten, I knew the language was the same. And yet At once the…
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,…
Children’s books for Christmas
If it’s all right with you, I’d like to launch a campaign please. Right here. You may be wanting me…
Language
And when I landed in America, aged ten, I knew the language was the same. And yet At once the…
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,…
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…
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 —…