Journalists seldom get to the top in politics. They find it hard to trot out the dreary virtue-signalling that political communication often requires. Chris Mullin, I suspect, finds it almost impossible. He was a Bennite, but the Bennites quickly discovered he was unreliable. The Blairites might have welcomed him had they not suspected, rightly, that
Few authors have left such an immediate legacy as Roger Deakin. When he died of a sudden illness in 2007, aged 63, he had written just two books: Waterlog, which set off the wild swimming craze, and the even more influential Wildwood, which helped kickstart the publishing phenomenon of nature writing. Yet both books only
Architecture is a public art, but public intellectuals tend to engage with more abstract stuff. The style-wars ructions excited by our new King nearly 40 years ago have been settled by gravity, but intelligent discussion about what makes a great building is still a rarity, especially in the Ministry of Levelling Up, where there is
‘Two mobs of men fighting over possession of a ball in a freezing, muddy river in Derbyshire,’ writes Harry Pearson, ‘is the British equivalent of the Rio Carnival.’ He’s not wrong. Brazil may have the sun, but we’ve got the capacity for mindless violence. It’s a trait expressed in many of the folk sports covered
‘Like a child in a fairy tale’, 14-year old Mina Mendel walks into a Latvian forest one day in 1913. With her basket and shawl, she looks like Little Red Riding Hood, but the wolves she meets – Bolsheviks, ‘agents of the coming revolution’ – are anything but mythical. Linda Grant begins her sweeping, ambitious
A friend of mine, an inspirational teacher, says that one of the best things parents can do is to allow children to believe that their dreams can come true. Arthur Parkinson met his first chicken as a toddler, growing up in a former mining town, and from that moment he longed for a brood of
Roddy Tebbit is a quiet, tidy professor researching lake algae. His calendar is largely empty and his apartment has no family photographs. A colleague remembers him as ‘shy to the point of being rude’. Why somebody would put a bullet in his skull is unclear, yet this is how the cynical gumshoe Cal Sounder discovers
The 1930s saw Walter Benjamin write The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Marlene Dietrich rise to fame in The Blue Angel and Pablo Picasso paint ‘Guernica’. If history books mention these events, it’s usually as footnotes to the main European narrative of the pre-war decade. To shift the rise of Nazism,
Though wokeness is a vile thing, it has contributed to our culture in one fortunate way – by inspiring brilliant books which refute it. The woeful lack of anything passing for analysis (probably a colonial tool of oppression, like brunch) on the SJW side has thrown into gloriously sharp relief the difference in the intellectual
The England cricket team was once greeted at an Ashes test by an Australian banner with the immortal words ‘WOTHAM IS A BANKER’, the simple genius of the line being that you knew Wotham was being insulted before you had worked out quite who Wotham was, or what exactly he was being accused of. But,
Kathryn Scanlan’s second novel Kick the Latch is adapted from the transcript of an interview with a family friend in her native Iowa. Its narrator, Sonia, looks back on her years as a racetrack hand in a series of vignettes. She recounts run-ins with violent men, a freak accident that put her in a coma,
‘When everyone appears to be of one accord in thinking the right thing, go the other way.’ This was, broadly speaking, the maxim by which J.C. wrote his weekly N.B. column for the Times Literary Supplement, after inheriting it from David Sexton in 1997. Tonally different to the rest of the paper, N.B. under J.C.
While George Orwell was staying with his family in Southwold during the 1930s, figuring out how to become a writer, the town pharmacist was busy shooting ciné footage. On the edge of a crowd watching a circus parade, he captured a tall man smoking at a street corner. It’s impossible to identify this brief glimpse
The narrator-protagonist of Deborah Levy’s August Blue, an elite-level concert pianist called Elsa, is going through a difficult time. She recently walked off stage after messing up a Rachmaninoff recital in Vienna. More worryingly, she has just dyed her hair blue. At a market stall in Athens, she becomes entranced by a pair of novelty
Elizabeth Day has found her niche as an astute, approachable social anthropologist, observing emotions and behaviour we are reluctant to discuss – such as failure – and draining them of their stigma. Her new book tackles the subject of friendship, which she points out has been far less analysed than romantic relationships. Her honesty and
It happens usually in the second week of May, between about the 8th and 12th (this year it was earlier, the 2nd): a distant sound, building as it approaches, and then the doppler dip as the first of the returning swifts screeches past the roof of our Cornish farmhouse. It’s the opening bracket of the
In middle age you’re supposed to feel nostalgia for your youth, but I finished this book marvelling at how dreadful the 1980s were. The decade hit rock bottom in May 1985 when, within 18 days, 56 football fans died in a fire at Bradford City and 39 in crushes before the Liverpool-Juventus match at the
Michael Arditti’s 13th novel The Choice is full of tough moral conundrums. The central dilemma facing Clarissa Phipps, the rector of St Peter’s Church in Tapley, Cheshire, is particularly knotty. Should she remove the church’s panels depicting a troublingly sensuous Eden, painted by the degenerate artist Seward Wemlock in the 1980s, or leave them to
The journalist Stig Abell has such a versatile CV – moving from the Sun to editorship of the TLS and then to his present morning slot on Times Radio – that it’s no surprise he has dipped a toe into the crime-writing waters where so many semi-celebrities increasingly swim. What may be surprising, given the
Polly Toynbee’s fascinating, multi-generational memoir comes with a caveat to a Spectator reviewer. While her book is written with ‘self-conscious awareness’, Toynbee predicts, with a cautionary wag of the finger, that it will be reviewed in publications where ‘introspection is inconvenient’. Not a page goes by without a reference to the iniquities of class, accent,