Books
Four ways to win Waterloo
The Kaiser’s war deprived Britain of her centenary celebrations of the victory at Waterloo. It also set the propagandists something…
While Holmes is away
Careful Sherlockians, on returning in adulthood to the four novels and 56 short stories that they devoured uncritically in their…
Title Stories: Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe
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The history of the home – with the spittoons put back in
In 1978, a family of Russian ‘Old Believers’ living in a supposedly uninhabited part of the Siberian taiga were discovered…
The man who was mistaken for a deer
‘And anything by Michael Connelly’ were the final words of advice from one of my best friends in discussing books…
Jeff Koons’s latest achievement: a new standard in prolix, complacent, solipsistic, muddled drivel
Jeff Koons is, by measures understood in Wall Street, the most successful living artist. But he’s a slick brand manager…
Lolita's secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite
Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of…
Books and arts
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Title Stories: Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe
The post Title Stories: Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the…
Title Stories: Doctor Faustus By Christopher Marlowe
Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment below.
Books and arts
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My mad gay grandfather and me
Mirabel Cecil on Lord Berners’s volatile ménage — as surprising and colourful as his famous dyed doves
From working-class heroes to Disney World mascots: the sad fate of the Chilean miners
On 5 August 2010, 33 men entered the remote San José mine in Chile’s Atacama desert to begin their 12-hour…
The Irony of Wislava Szymborska
In London, I remember the indignation. Surely the Nobel prize should have gone to Zbigniew Herbert, the Polish poet we…
How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions
There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is…
The bonkers (and not-so-bonkers) theories of what the pre-historic people of Cornwall believed
Philip Marsden’s book is about place. He makes a distinction between place and space. In his mind ‘place’ is something…
The Etonian peer who became an assistant to a Mexican commie
The lefty hereditary peer has few equals as a figure of fun, in life or literature. The late Tony Benn…
A woman who wears her homes like garments
Depending on your approach, home is where your heart is, where you hang your hat, or possibly where you hang…
Why everyone wants what Nora Ephron was having
I have come late to Nora Ephron — a little too late for her, anyway, as she died in 2012.…
Detective drama Dostoevsky-style
In the world of Gaito Gazdanov, a Russian émigré soldier turned taxi driver who began writing fiction in the 1920s,…
Why prefabs really were fab
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
When Irish nationalism meant sexual adventure
One of the easiest mistakes to make about history is to assume that the past is like the recent past,…
Ezra Pound – the fascist years
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
Tolstoy’s favourite novel is a guide to being idle
Oblomov, first published in 1859, is the charming tale of a lazy but lovable aristocrat in 19th-century Russia. The novel’s…
Is it boring being the god of the sea?
Writing to a god seems a presumptuous thing. Who are we, feeble mortal creatures whose lives pass in the blink…
