Ian Sansom

Edward Wilson-Lee writes rather chin-strokey, erudite books for the half-educated general reader with a strong taste for big ideas and the ever-so-slightly weird –which is to say people exactly like me and very possibly like you. The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Young Columbus and the Quest for a Universal Library (2018); A History of Water:

We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow

If you have been to a football match in the past few years you will doubtless be familiar with what the Crown Prosecution Service defines as ‘tragedy-related abuse’. It is when supporters, David Peace writes, sing, chant or gesture offensive messages about disasters or accidents involving players or fans – including references to the Hillsborough

According to Clive James: ‘A life without fame can be a good life, but fame without a life is no life at all.’ In My Family: The Memoir, the famous comedian David Baddiel proves he’s also had a life. Or, at least, a family. For anyone who hasn’t been paying attention – and Baddiel, as

Volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes. You wait years for a good book or a film about volcanoes to come along and then they blow up all at once. In 2022, Sara Dosa’s incredible, unmissable – incroyable! incontournable! – documentary about the eccentric French filmmakers and volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, Fire of Love, was nominated for an

If you are under 40, you probably already know of Joel Golby. He writes stream-of-consciousness personal essays and the satirical ‘Rental Opportunity of the Week’ column for Vice. For older readers, think, say, William Leith or Caitlin Moran. For even older readers, think maybe Thurber, Perelman or Dorothy Parker. And for the truly ancient, see

Literary scandals – like actual scandals – come and go. Who now recalls, or indeed cares less about, the hoo-ha surrounding whether or not the professional huckster James Frey made stuff up in his much celebrated 2004 memoir A Million Little Pieces and then had the audacity to lie about it to Oprah Winfrey? Anyone

‘The production of souls is more important than the production of tanks… And therefore I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.’ The quote is usually attributed to Stalin, though the phrase ‘engineers of human souls’ most likely came from someone else. Who’s to argue? Purges, executions, deportations – what’s

As anyone who has ever been lucky enough to spend time in a psychiatric hospital knows, you don’t have to be completely mad to be there. A lot of us end up in the care of mental health professionals and jacked up on all sorts of crazy-person meds because something’s just not right: you know

Joshua Paul Dale is a professor of American literature and culture at Chuo University in Tokyo and a pioneer in what is apparently a burgeoning academic field called ‘Cute Studies’ – or what Damon Runyon might have called ‘Pretty Cute’ Studies, as in ‘“Are You Kidding Me? You Study This?” Studies.’ In fairness, Dale makes

When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds

It’s been a while since I read a good cento, from the Latin and derived from the Greek, I need not remind Spectator readers, meaning ‘patchwork’, and thus a literary work composed of quotations from other writers, the earliest known example being Hosidius Geta’s Medea, consisting entirely of lines from Virgil and which is almost

Whether you’re left, right or just somewhere vaguely in between, wherever you’re coming from you may well have a sense that things are somehow not quite right, that the country is headed in the wrong direction, that our various problems and crises seem to be multiplying. You may well have concluded that this is because

It is very possible that Peter Kemp is the best-read man in Britain. Certainly, as the Sunday Times’s chief literary critic for goodness knows how many years, he has read and opined upon more works of new fiction than most. His is either a dream job or an absolute nightmare, depending on how you feel

Hello, summer! This is it. If you have been waiting for your big holiday read, finally here it is: an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing. It is never a good idea to begin a review (or indeed to end one) with a round of

People just love books about creativity and the imagination and how to be better or smarter or more efficient. And when I say people, I mean me. I am ripe, frankly, for wholesale improvement and upgrade, right across the board – physically, emotionally and spiritually, you name it. I want to know, Molesworth-like, How to

Memoirs by poets – the Top Ten? It’s an admittedly niche category, and since no one would ask this in normal conversation, or even in a pub quiz, here is the chart. It is based not on official sales or downloads but rather on my own tastes, prejudices and relatively recent reading: Last Night’s Fun,

Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it,