There is a popular book for new parents called What to Expect the First Year by Arlene Eisenberg. In the chapter on what to expect during the third month there is a list of things your baby should be able to do. One of these is ‘pay attention to a raisin or other very small
Listing page content here Sitting at the window shelling peasinto a battered colander between my knees(sweet, pod-swollen peas of early May)till suddenly I find I’ve slipped awaysixty years and vividly recallrough stone on bare legs astride a wallswinging sandalled feet, a summer tanon knees, arms, face and summer in my hair;a cat sprawled in the
Towards the end of the Seventies I was asked to write a short, critical study of Muriel Spark’s novels. I accepted, with some trepidation and misgivings. At least I hope there were misgivings. There should have been, first because nothing equipped me for the task apart from my admiration for her novels and, perhaps, the
Listing page content here Non-fiction: Rosebery by Leo McKinstry, John Murray, £10.99 Elizabeth The Queen Mother by Hugo Vickers, Arrow, £9.99 The Vote by Paul Foot, Penguin, £9.99 1599 by James Shapiro, Faber, £8.99 The Wreckers by Bella Bathurst, HarperPerennial, £8.99 Father Joe by Tony Hendra, Penguin, £8.99 The Ice Museum by Joanna Kavenna, Penguin,
Listing page content here I’m so glad I came to this book fresh, my mind open and unsullied by all that had gone before. As it was, I could sit back and enjoy the labyrinthine plot with all its platitudinous twists and unexpected turns as a real beginner without one preconceived idea in my head.
Aged 12 or 13 I copied several poems by Housman into a commonplace book I had been encouraged to keep. An English master had read several Housman poems to us, and I’ve been grateful ever since. For some years Housman was my favourite poet, till superseded by Byron (Don Juan especially) and Eliot. The melody
This wonderful small book brings to an end much journalistic nonsense that followed 11 September 2001 in its definitive treatment of its causes and repercussions. To the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan, what happened on that day was a natural conclusion to decades of Arab frustration and Western neglect. Honourably, but not totally successfully, he
At Easter, Christians bear witness to the Resurrection. But, as The Spectator has discovered, some are more robust than others in their belief — and some prefer not talk about it at all Easter is the most important feast in the Christian calendar. ‘If Christ be not risen,’ wrote St Paul, ‘then is our preaching
Henry Cockburn (1779-1854) was a Scots advocate, Solicitor-General in the reforming Whig government of 1832-41, later a judge, contributor to the Edinburgh Review and author of delightful, posthumously published memoirs and journals. A considerable figure in the Edinburgh of his time, he is commemorated in the Cockburn Association, one of the earliest conservation societies, founded
Though the relentlessness of its attack is kept up almost to the end, nothing in Mother’s Milk is quite so funny as its second chapter. This finds the Melrose family — 40-something barrister Patrick, wife Mary, five-year-old Robert and newly born Thomas — hiding in the guest bedroom of old Mrs Melrose’s house in the
A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645) What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We
When the hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool was asked which modern writers he admired, he replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Eliot and Joyce have held up well enough, but Douglas? ‘I thought he was quite forgotten,’ one well-read friend remarked to me. So perhaps he is. But he loomed quite large
New York There was a disclaimer of sorts in the programme for William Buckley’s 80th birthday party and National Review’s 50th: ‘WFB guarantees never again to figure in any celebration in which he has a leading role.’ It is the kind of thing a pope or retiring president would announce, but then Bill Buckley is
The 22nd annual Threadneedle/ Spectator Parliamentarian of the Year lunch took place last Thursday at Claridge’s and the prizes were presented by the Rt Hon. Charles Kennedy, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Welcoming Mr Kennedy, the editor of The Spectator, Boris Johnson, recalled the tumultuous events at last year’s luncheon. He said that among the
Donald Dewar once said to me, ‘I can’t stand your journalism, but I like your novels.’ It was perhaps characteristic of him that he put it in that order, the disapproval first. It wasn’t just that he was given to speaking his mind, or that he was capable, as his friend, Fiona Ross, one of
Published recently in the Times, William Rees-Mogg’s contention (in a well-meaning if speciously argued piece on the Vatican’s continuing opposition to the ordination of self-confessed homosexuals) that the sexual proclivities of priests attracted to pre-pubertal children was ‘comparable to Oscar Wilde’s relations with London rent boys’ is typical of a fashionable misapprehension which confuses paedophila
Julian Maclaren-Ross died in 1964, in circumstances quite as chaotic as the moth-eaten, bailiff-haunted atmosphere of his novels. Despite occasional murmurs over the intervening 40 years, the real revival of interest in his work began with a 2001 Penguin Modern Classic edition of his South Coast vacuum cleaner salesman epic Of Love and Hunger. There
The Hallé Orchestra launched its new season last week in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, with a rich programme featuring works by two late Romantic masters. They played Elgar’s Enigma Variations as well as one would expect of a band that enjoys an unparalleled relationship with that composer, and they performed Death and Transfiguration, one of Richard
No commemorative blue plaque adorns the wall of 112 Eaton Square, ‘that curious house’, in Barbara Pym’s words, ‘with its oil paintings and smell of incense’. Yet, as David Faber reveals in this important history of the Amery family, for over 70 years the house was one of the foremost London political salons. The paterfamilias
Nearly 30 years ago I asked Rupert Hart-Davis, nephew and literary executor of Duff Cooper, whether I could see these diaries for a biography I was writing of Duff’s wife, Diana. ‘Not the slightest point, dear boy,’ he replied. ‘They are no more than a chronicle of unbridled extravagance, drunkenness and lechery.’ Eventually he relented