Spectator Book Club launch party photos
Last night, The Spectator and Barclays Wealth held a launch party for the online Spectator Book Club. We’ve uploaded photos of that event, which you can see here. Or click here to access the Book Club itself.
Culture
The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Boldly for restoration
More from BooksWales, by Simon Jenkins Last year, having been to Scotland, I called on the mother of an old friend. Mrs Molly Jones of Carmarthen, I found to my great surprise, was very enthusiastic about Scotland. It was so unlike Wales, she said. All those castles . . . ‘But Mrs Jones, there are castles at
Dark and creepy
More from BooksThe Folio Book of Historical Mysteries, edited by Ian Pindar This book, which is a collection of 20 essays on events and people from history, first seriously caught my attention when I started reading the piece about Shakespeare. Of course, I’d always had the nagging sense, on the fringes of my mind, that some people
The devil’s work
More from BooksTiming is all. In 1969 Margaret Atwood’s An Edible Woman was published, and its iconic portrayal of women moulded into objects for male consumption caught the crest of the feminist wave and surfed into the shelves of required reading. Almost four decades on, Payback, her meditation on the nature of debt, appears just as the
Memoirs of the Great War
More from BooksSurvivors of a Kind, by Brian Bond In Survivors of a Kind, Brian Bond, one of our most distinguished modern military historians, has written an absorbing and affectionate study of the military memoirs of the first world war, bearing all the authority of a life- time’s work on the British Army. With some of the
6 December 2008
This battle has just begun
More from The Week‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram. ‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram. ‘I know now that it’s the sweet, sweating smell of hope,
At Home in Turkey
More from BooksIf you can’t afford the airfare you might take this delicious guided tour instead. Exploring some of the best contemporary Turkish houses (or caves), the photographer, Solvi dos Santos, divides her subjects by season, as if to emphasise the perpetual variety of Turkey’s terrain — and the successive civilisations that have held sway there. Berrin
Differences and similarities
More from BooksWest Workroom towards a new sobriety in architecture theory + practice, by Paolo Conrad-Bercah+w office (including contributions from Daniel Sherer, Pierluigi Panza and George Baird) ‘This is not a book….’ These are the opening words of this initially unfathomable paperback volume of architectural ramblings. It has been assembled as an account of the work of
4 December 2008
Spectator Christmas reading list
Over at the Book Club, Spectator editorial staff have put together a list of recommended books to read over Christmas. You can see their suggestions here.
3 December 2008
The view from the middle lane
More from BooksThe Hugo Young Papers: Thirty Years of British Politics — Off the Record, by Hugo Young, edited by Ion Trewin The late Hugo Young was the political columnist of the chattering classes. This book, rather more grandly, describes him as the ‘the Pope of the liberal left’. A lifelong Cath- olic, educated by Ampleforth monks
Living the legend
More from BooksMy Judy Garland Life, by Susie Boyt The story of Judy Garland is a magnificent example of the truth that life imitates art. Things would surely have been different had she stuck to being Frances Ethel Gumm of Grand Rapids, Minnesota. As it was, the trajectory of her life under the stage name she assumed
But where is Colonel Blimp?
The Triumph of Music, by Tim Blanning This is an often entertaining, occasionally illuminating, but cur- iously unsatisfying book, written by a distinguished historian of early modern Europe. Subtitled ‘Composers, Musicians and their Audiences, 1700 to the Present’, it purports to be a study of the ways that the art of music has increasingly come
Saints and sinners
More from BooksWith the publication of their Christmas cookery books, Nigella, Jamie, Delia and Gordon all have a brand image, or a halo, to polish. Nigella’s brand is greedy, kitsch, sexy and celebratory, and in Nigella Christmas (Chatto & Windus, £25) she has found her perfect subject. The book is fun, but it is also very thorough:
A rose-tinted view of the bay
More from BooksThe Ancient Shore, by Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller Variety of impression, diversity of atmosphere and mood, incongruities of many kinds, these are only to be expected in books on travel, and perhaps particularly in one concerning Naples. But The Ancient Shore is by two hands, and there is a radical difference in style and
Humph swings
Last Chorus: An Autobiographical Medley, by Humphrey Lyttleton ‘Old Etonian ex-Guards Officer jazz trumpeter’. That was the way tabloid gossip columnists used to describe Humphrey Lyttelton (1921-2008) in the early years of his fame. Not long after he was released from the Grenadiers at the end of the second world war, he hyphenated his identity
Surprising literary ventures | 3 December 2008
More from Books‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is
29 November 2008
Global warning | 29 November 2008
Any other businessBecause of the economic crisis, I was waiting at the bus station: £2.80 for a bus instead of £28 for a taxi home. I had 50 minutes to wait and was reading a book by Richard Yates. I was wondering why the literature of so optimistic a country as America was so deeply pessimistic (awareness
How to write a wrong
More from Books‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge.’ ‘When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of Hate, Suspicion and Despair, all the Love in the world will not wholly take away that
26 November 2008
Stars bright and dim
More from BooksMuch great American writing is regional in a way that British or French writing never has been. Most of the best writing coming from the States inhabits a place which apparently feels no pressure from the great metropolitan centres — Annie Proulx on the Texas panhandle, Cormac McCarthy on the Mexican border territories, Jane Smiley
The spice of danger
More from BooksFrom the Front Line: Family Letters & Diaries, 1900 to the Falklands & Afghanistan, by Hew Pike ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier,’ reckoned Dr Johnson, and certainly every soldier thinks the less of himself for not having seen action. For four generations the extended Pike family has written
Gruff Justice
More from BooksJames Robertson Justice: What’s the Bleeding Time? by James Hogg, with Robert Sellers and Howard Watson ‘You — what’s the bleeding time?’ Sir Lancelot Spratt, consultant surgeon at St Swithin’s, barks at Dirk Bogarde’s trainee doctor. ‘Ten past ten, sir’ is the sheepish answer. Another cherishable exchange in the long-running series of medical comedies sees
Chalk and cheese
More from BooksThe British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution, by Peter Thorold Peter Thorold has not written an orthodox history of French and British political cultural and social relations. He sees them through the eyes of Britons who settled in France or tourists who trod its soil for a brief holiday. French aristocrats who
Highs and lows on the laughometer
More from BooksJust What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance What might seem an obviously Christmassy book is Robin Laurance’s Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents (Quercus, £9.99); but it is mainly about birthday presents. One thing that it doesn’t include is a present I saw
Not just Hitler
More from BooksThe Third Reich at War, 1939-1945, by Richard L. Evans Any historian attempting a survey of Nazi Germany during the second world war confronts formidable challenges. First, the available literature is so huge that it almost defies synthesis in a single volume, however substantial. Second, the author needs to avoid writing yet another Hitler biography.
Deadlier than the male
More from BooksWhen does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s
The power of the evasive word
More from BooksThe Economist Book of Obituaries, by Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe De mortuis nil nisi bonum, or so it used to be said. That was then. Now, since the late Hugh Montgomery- Massingbird became obituaries editor of the Telegraph, James Fergusson of the Independent, and Keith Colquhoun and Ann Wroe of the Economist, all has
24 November 2008
Should We Be More Like Bonobos?
I dunno. But perhaps we should try and ignore our warrior-chimp ancestry and learn from the blessed, peaceful bonobos. At least that seems to be the idea behind Sex & War: How Biology Explains War and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World. Yes, I know what you’re thinking: another trendy but implausibly
22 November 2008
Love between the lines
More from BooksWords in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton Why does this book need to exist? It’s a legitimate question — the correspondence of both these poets has been published in generous selected editions — but an easy one to answer. Quite apart from the
Recent audio books | 22 November 2008
More from BooksTo some of us solitude may be sitting on a park bench amidst a bustling city. To Trond Sander, seclusion is a rickety forest cabin in the far east of Norway. For company his only companion is his dog, Lyra. Isolation is 67-year-old Trond’s chosen existence — ‘all my life I have longed to be