Poetry
Whitby Abbey is at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary history
The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good…
Why wasn’t Poetry Please in the Radio Times’s top 30 greatest radio shows of all time?
With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent…
The story of the cook who spent 10 years preparing food for those on death row
You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness,…
I love life – and girls – too much to act my age
New York A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of…
Francis of Assisi’s life in poetry will stay in the mind forever
This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long…
Pithy and profound: the beauty of aphorisms
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to…
![A woman-child of dangerous assurance: Allison Cook as Salome in Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera. [Catherine Ashmore]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/6Octopera.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A fascinating failure, but a failure nonetheless: ENO’s Salome reviewed
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of…
The night I kissed Harold Pinter
I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and…
Like ‘gammon’, ‘spasmodic’ was a term to put down a despised tendency
To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
He, they, fae, fer or ze? Check your pronouns
Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today…
A Book of Chocolate Saints: an Indian novel like no other
The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One…
Trahison des clercs — a phrase that dates back all the way to 1927
I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
Nine reasons to be cheerful this year
Since it’s the first week of the New Year I’m going to pretend the bad stuff isn’t happening and focus…
I never understood the appeal of Ken Dodd
It’s always odd to hear a familiar voice on a different programme, playing an alternative role. They never sound quite…
How pleasant to know Mr Lear
Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…
Who is Sylvia – what is she?
In May 1956, three months after meeting Ted Hughes, one before they will marry, Sylvia Plath writes to her mother…
A beautiful place to die: Italy and the Romantic poets
People can be mightily protective of their Romantic poets. When I worked at the Keats Shelley House, overlooking the Spanish…
BBC4’s Bob Geldof on WB Yeats was one of the best literary documentaries I’ve seen
In recent years there’s been a fashion for arts documentaries presented by celebs rather than boring old experts — presumably…
What I’ve learned reciting poems in the street
What I’ve learned from reciting verse in the street
How to view the view
It’s not all picnics and cowslips. You need sense as well as sensibility to appreciate a landscape, says Mary Keen
Charles Foster: ‘I need to be more of a badger’
Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That…
The confessions of Gerard Manley Hopkins
‘I am 12 miles from a lemon,’ lamented that bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith on reaching one country posting. He…
Songs of the blood and the sword
Douglas Murray 28 October 2017 9:00 am
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…