Literature
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in…
Who is your favourite character in children’s literature?
Rod Liddle Rabbits, always rabbits. I remember at age 13 forcing my poor parents to trudge despondently across hilly downland…
What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?
‘Nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry’, he says, in an anthology co-edited with Len McCluskey. But, judging by his own offering, afraid is what we should be
Why on earth did The Spectator support Brexit?
The temperature has hit 40°C in Crete, where I am writing this, and although there have been no fires, nothing…
Evil geniuses
Does knowledge of the wrongs committed by Caravaggio, Picasso, Roman Polanski and other ‘monsters’ condition our response to their art, wonders Claire Dederer
Forgotten books worth rediscovering
Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous…
Why Russian literature shouldn’t be cancelled
Russians must mobilise their own culture against Putin
Don’t read Ulysses; listen to it
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
What Norman Mailer’s ‘cancellation’ reveals
What Norman Mailer’s ‘cancellation’ reveals
Why we should study literature, not science
Gstaad Who was it who said good manners had gone the way of black and white TV? Actually it was…
My literary heroes have led me astray
Gstaad Good manners aside, what I miss nowadays is a new, intelligent, finely acted movie. Never have I seen…
It's impossible not to feel snooty watching ITV's Agatha and Poirot
Agatha and Poirot was one of those programmes that had the annoying effect of making you feel distinctly snooty. ITV’s…
How not to run a literary festival
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
Lydia Davis, like an inspirational teacher, tempts her readers into more reading
A good indicator of just how interesting and alluring Lydia Davis’s Essays proved might be my recent credit card statement.…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
Fame made Gabriel García Márquez a pedantic bore
Gerald Martin’s titanic biography of 2010, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, was the product of 17 years of research and…
Writing as revenge: Memories of the Future, by Siri Hustvedt, reviewed
Why are people interested in their past? One possible reason is that you can interact with it, recruiting it as…
Critical injuries: the perils of book reviews
A decade ago, a publisher produced a set of short biographies of Britain’s 20th-century prime ministers, which I reviewed unenthusiastically.…
The two works of fiction I re-read annually
Long ago, I interviewed Edmund White and found that the photographer assigned to the job was the incomparable Jane Bown…
Who really wants to read feminist children’s books?
A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’,…
How I write
How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write…
What I’ve learned reciting poems in the street
What I’ve learned from reciting verse in the street
Aphorisms and the arts: from Aristotle to Oscar Wilde
The author of this jam-packed treasure trove has been a film critic at the New York Times since 2000 and…
Autumn, season of conkers and new boots
Each year when I see the first conker of the autumn I think: fire up the ancestral ovens! This incendiary…
