When from my eyrie beneath the Christ Corcovado I looked closely at this (unusually) typed letter from Ian Fleming I saw that it was ‘dictated in his absence’ and that it must have been sent by the devoted ‘Griffie’, model for Miss Moneypenny. Scarcely surprising: five days later, on the 12th birthday of his only
For the last 50 years Americans have been decrying the increase of presidential power whenever the party they oppose is in office. Republicans hated to see Kennedy and Clinton throwing their weight around, while Democrats deplored the ‘imperial presidency’ of Nixon and Reagan. F.H. Buckley, a Canadian law professor now working in Virginia, explains why
During the Spanish civil war the single greatest atrocity perpetrated by the Republicans was known as ‘Paracuellos’. This was the village where an estimated 2,500 prisoners loyal to Franco were executed by leftish militiamen between November and December 1936. Even though the facts of this massacre are now widely known, one question still remains: who
Larger than Europe and the United States combined, Siberia is an enormous swathe of Russia, spanning seven time zones and occuping 77 per cent of the country’s land mass. Ryszard Kapuscinski describes the gulags which were placed there as being amongst the greatest nightmares of the 20th century — and that image of suffering has
There is farce in Peter Oborne’s history of cricket in Pakistan. An impossible umpire is abducted by drunken English tourists and imprisoned in their hotel. Political uncertainty leads to the selection of rival captains and players for the same match against New Zealand. An ageing Pakistan cricketer is ruled out of a one-day international after
In Aljezur we took a walk And paused above the river where, Among the rushes, swifts and fish, We saw a water-snake drink the air Before the reptile rippled back And watched until an azure flash Flew from the bridge to walnut tree, A kingfisher in sudden flight, A memorised epiphany Almost before it came
A Season with Verona (2002), Tim Parks’s account of a year on tour with the Italian football club Hellas Verona’s notorious travelling fans (motto ‘we have a dream in our heads, to burn the south’), contains a memorable scene in which Parks spots a teenage boy screaming abuse at some rival supporters before returning to
In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and had no idea where or who he was. A kindly tourist police officer reassured him that his case wasn’t unusual: plenty of young people came to India, took too many drugs and ended up similarly
Early on in The Girl Next Door, Ruth Rendell gives the reader a sharp nudge. ‘Colin Quell had very little interest in people, what they might think, how they might act in the future.’ The novel is Rendell’s latest stand alone mystery, the uninterested Quell its detective inspector. Forcibly she announces that neither physically nor
Chris Barber, still going strong with his big band, was born in 1930. He heard jazz as a schoolboy on the radio programme Music While You Work and tried to find out more about this wonderful music. He soon discovered that, in his words, ‘black music was the real thing, although some white people managed
‘He was a wise man who invented beer,’ said Plato, although I imagine he had changed his mind by the following morning. Beer: A Global History (Reaktion, £9.99, Spectator Bookshop, £9.49) is the latest addition to ‘The Edible Series’, following Cake, Caviar, Offal, Wine, Soup and, rather shockingly, Hot Dog into the catalogue. As reading
This book, with its absurdly uninformative photographs, dismal charts and smattering of charmless drawings, looks like a report. A pity, because it is a thorough and entertaining history; the first to cover the entire London area within a 20-mile radius of St Paul’s, from the earliest record, in Roman times, to the present. A chronology
‘Everybody could see that this man was not a “monster”, but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown,’ wrote Hannah Arendt of Adolf Eichmann, in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Indeed, Eichmann was certified as ‘normal’ by half a dozen psychiatrists. On more than one occasion in Martin Amis’s troubling new novel
Ivor Roberts-Jones was in many ways the right artist at the wrong time. Had the sculptor been born a few decades earlier and worked in the Victorian age, when statues of the builders and defenders of empire were erected proudly and prolifically across the land, he’d surely have received no end of garlands. As it
The TV chat show, if not actually dead, has been in intensive care for a while now, hooked up to machines that go bleep. But the long-form interview, as pioneered by John Freeman’s Face to Face in the 1960s, is a tougher customer. Laurie Taylor’s In Confidence series on Sky Arts has featured the great
Right at the outset of this autobiographical novel — in fact it reads more like a memoir — Ismail Kadare sets up his stall as a lover of women. His lust even permeates his similes: ‘… that particular path, like some women who, though not beautiful, possess a hidden charm…’ and that’s only the walk
On Monday 21 April 1760 Joshua Reynolds had a busy day. Through the morning and the afternoon he had a series of sitters. Each of these stayed for an hour in the painter’s premises on St Martin’s Lane and was no doubt ‘greatly entertained’ — as another of Reynolds’s clients recorded — by watching the
There are the fast people who check their emails hourly, engage with Twitter and multi- task their way through the day. And there are the slow ones who never reply even to your third request, and almost miss meetings and prefer pencil. The first — the fast — will be up to advise the worm,
When the American poet Elizabeth Bishop arrived in Brazil in 1951, she expected to spend two weeks there and ended up staying 15 years, a time of emotional turbulence and creative productivity. Bishop wrote poetry and prose and translated Latin American writers, including Octavio Paz, but this project, suggested by friends as a way to
Is it the feathers that do the trick? The severely truculent expressions on their faces? Or is it their ancient origins? Or the places where they live? Whatever their secret, birds of prey have exercised an extraordinary hold on human beings for tens of thousands of years. In the bad old days, their fans ranged