Books
Man on the run: Sugar Street, by Jonathan Dee, reviewed
How long can a fugitive avoid detection after holing up in a city ‘big enough to be anonymous in’?
The true meaning of Jesus’s radical message
David Lloyd Dusenbury finds Jesus a ‘philosophically intriguing’ figure – and much bigger than a ‘mere’ revolutionary
The art of exclamation marks!
For centuries, grammarians considered it vulgar and warned against using it too freely – but Jane Austen saw the point of it, says Florence Hazrat
The life of Elizabeth Taylor was non-stop drama
Kate Andersen Brower has had access to the vast, unpublished archive of Hollywood’s queen - famed for her beauty, diamonds and unhappy marriages
Luminous fables: Night Train to the Stars, by Kenji Miyazawa, reviewed
A downcast cellist discovers that his music cures sick mice and rabbits in one of many tales featuring talking animals in eerie, folkloric landscapes
A fierce defiance: Love Me Tender, by Constance Debré, reviewed
Separated from her husband, Constance trains herself to be ‘indestructible’ while awaiting a ruling over custody of their son
Caring for the dying in a world of Zoom
James Runcie’s harrowing account of his wife’s last days during lockdown includes blackly comic descriptions of trying to follow nursing instructions on YouTube
There are no ‘correct’ recipes when it comes to pasta
Luca Cesari argues that pasta is a living thing, changing with the times, and has never been bound by tradition, as the vigilante nonnas insist
Bob Dylan’s idea of modern song is nothing of the sort
Most of the 66 songs he discusses in a collection of meditative essays date from the late 1940s to the advent of punk – a movement that evidently passed him by
Lord of the dance: the genius of George Balanchine
Balanchine described himself as ‘a cloud in trousers’ – and Jennifer Homans perfectly captures the earthly man and his ethereal gift
The depressing durability of dictatorships
Authoritarian regimes that have emerged out of violent social revolutions have survived on average three times as long as their non-revolutionary counterparts
How the Romans set an example of good business practice
Ever since the societas publicanorum, corporations have been linked with the common good, carrying out projects for which the state is ill-equipped
The imaginative energy of Katherine Mansfield
Claire Harman discusses ten of Mansfield’s short stories in connection with her tragically short life
Summer books
2022: good reads for a mixed bag of a year
Spot the book title
For answers, click here The post Spot the book title appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Empress Eugénie’s shrine to the Bonapartes
The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial –…
The collectors’ obsession with rare medieval manuscripts
Jonathan Sumption describes the age-old obsession of bibliophiles with acquiring rare illuminated manuscripts
Whoever persuaded Bono he could sing?
There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that…
A courtier’s lot: writing to prime ministers one minute, acting as nanny the next
Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen…
Meghan and Harry have never grasped the notion of ‘only connect’
In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him…
Robert Lowell struggled all his life to elude his rarefied Boston heritage
The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known…
Miller’s thumb and Mother-in-law’s garotte: the marvellous lexicon of angling
Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the…
The utter vileness of Richard Harris
Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course,…