A notable recent trend in popular history is the revival of interest in the ancient world. Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Bettany Hughes and Peter Stothard are just some of the historians whose books and television series have cashed in on our thirst for knowledge of distant forebears and their civilisations. Now Owen Rees joins the
Just about everyone is for liberty, but we mean different things by it. Far-right libertarians want almost all constraints on their actions removed. They desire free markets, no unions, low taxes, free speech and the freedom to be very rich. The oppressed want freedom from tyranny: in extremis, they want to be free from jail
Cold War Prague hid its historic charms under a veil of grime and dilapidation. But, as we learn from this deeply researched and scholarly study, it was still a favoured destination for international terrorists, mostly Palestinians, after the 1968 Soviet invasion. They liked its hotels, its proximity to the West, its medical facilities, the tolerance
The great auk was a large seabird of the family Alcidae, a group which includes the razorbill, guillemot and puffin, breeding species of North Atlantic cliffs, islands and skerries. Before it was hunted to extinction in the 1840s, the great auk inhabited an ecological niche equivalent to that of penguins in the southern hemisphere. Flightless,
London and the South East, The Innocent, Spring, All That Man Is, Turbulence – the titles of David Szalay’s first five novels, which won a flurry of prizes, are all captured, in a sense, by Flesh, his sixth. Much of the latest book is set in Britain’s capital, and the innocent frequently lose that tag
For many Spectator readers, their only exposure to the workings of the Whips’ Office will be through the machinations of Francis Urquhart, Michael Dobbs’s fictional chief whip made famous in House of Cards. In the first diaries published by a former chief whip, Simon Hart aims to shine a light on the vital and often
Quizzed about pop by the teen music magazine Smash Hits in 1987, the year of her third consecutive electoral victory, Margaret Thatcher singled out ‘Telstar’, a chart-topper from a quarter of a century earlier, for special praise. She pronounced it ‘a lovely song… I absolutely loved that. The Tornados, yes.’ As a whizzily futuristic sounding
Every government has its éminence grise. The quiet, ruthless man (or occasional woman) operates in the shadows, only to be eventually outed when the boys and girls in the backroom fall out among themselves or when someone pens a memoir. Think Peter Mandelson, Nick Timothy, Fiona Hill and Dominic Cummings. The authors of Get In,
In The Builder’s Stone, Melanie Phillips reminds us forcefully that we must never forget how 7 October 2023 changed the world. On that day Hamas terrorists from Gaza invaded southern Israel and brutally raped women and butchered or burned alive 1,100 Jewish men, women and children. They also dragged 250 Israelis, including three-year-old twins, grandparents
How do you make the life of Woody Allen unbearably dull? Mainly by retelling the plots of every one of his movies, along with lists of cast and crew, box-office receipts and critical reactions. And there are so many movies – 50 so far, but there’ll probably be another by the time you read this.
Call it a mosaic. Here it all is – the pathos of a botched first date, a birth, a death, a feud, a stumble into love. The Café With No Name deals with the small dramas of everyday life. The setting is Vienna – not the elegant city of Schönbrunn but the Karmelitermarkt, one of
Among the most striking and memorable exhibits in the British Museum are the Assyrian reliefs depicting the royal hunt. These huge panels show the king, Ashurbanipal, shooting, spearing and stabbing a succession of lions, albeit ones that had been trapped beforehand and released from cages for the occasion. It is a magnificent work of art,
Nearly a decade after Eimear McBride published The Lesser Bohemians (her second novel after the success of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing),the Irish writer has returned to the drab, smoke-filled world of 1990s London. The City Changes its Face is told from the perspective of 20-year-old Eily, two years after she has left Ireland
At 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber called Enola Gay dropped ‘Little Boy’ over Hiroshima. The thermal radiation from the atom bomb was 900 times more searing than the sun. An estimated 118,661 civilians died, horribly. Survivors staggered about with their skin in shreds, their intestines hanging out and their blacked and
Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery
What did the great Marxist historian Christopher Hill think of orgies? Michael Braddick’s splendid and judicious biography doesn’t ponder this question. However, it strikes me as worth posing since, for a three-week period in the winter of 1978, an ensemble of actors (including the future Hollywood star Bob Hoskins) could be found naked at the
Christopher Fowler was almost absurdly prolific, for much of his life combining fiction with a hectic job heading a film promotion company (he wrote the Alien tagline ‘In space no one can hear you scream’). His debut, the horror novel Roofworld, was inspired by the view from the top of his Soho office building. Soho
Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s 25th novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress,
Edmund White grew up in a world where sex, and gay sex in particular, was an unspoken reality. In 1950s Cincinnati, ‘no one “came out” except drag queens and the campy peroxided waiter at the diner’, he writes in the first chapter of The Loves of My Life. That blanket of near-silence doesn’t seem to
When Howard Amos first came to Russia, in 2007, it was a country you visited with interest, even enthusiasm. Modernisation, potentially a progressive development, was on the cards; America was getting ready to ‘reset’ US-Russian relations; foreigners were able to volunteer at Russian orphanages. That was what Amos did, working with disadvantaged children in Pskov