Nicola Shulman is a British biographer, former model, aristocrat, and the author of Graven with Diamonds.
29 min listen
On this episode of Spectator Out Loud, Douglas Murray starts by explaining why C. S. Lewis was right about war. (00:56) Mary Wakefield is up next, looking at the founding myth that Russia and Ukraine are fighting over. (10:18) Nicola Shulman finishes the podcast, reading her piece about Philip Larkin’s big problem. (16:53)
In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biographer,
Some years ago, a woman wrote to Dear Mary, at the back of this periodical, with an unusual problem: she was a keen follower of new fiction but felt guilty to be seen lying around on sofas reading novels in the presence of her domestic staff. Mary advised that she should let it be known
‘If you cn rd ths msg, you cn bcm a sec & gt a gd jb’. So ran the advertisement for the Brook Street Bureau employment agency. It was the ubiquitous ornament of tube trains, buses and escalators in the 1970s, now seen no more and forgotten, at least by me, until Andrew Hadfield’s biography
Bring Up the Bodies, as everybody knows, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s fictional re-imagining of the life and times of Henry VIII’s most effective servant, Thomas Cromwell. We have long been banging our spoons and forks for it. Speaking for myself, I finished the first with an almost unbearable curiosity to find
Draw two two-inch triangles, tip to tip, one on top of the other. A little way down the left flank of the upper triangle, take a perpendicular line out to an inch, then turn your pencil at a right angle and continue another inch. Repeat on the other side. Next, draw two short, splayed lines
