Parallel Universes Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Sarah PerryThe Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia; a memoir; a handbook on how not to write a novel; and irreverently
Verse and reverse | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Lucy VickeryIn Competition No. 3098 you were invited to submit a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, i.e. from the top down and the bottom up. I worried, as the entries trickled in, that I had set the too
Magnus Carlsen Ivory gates | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Raymond KeeneThis year’s Grand Chess Tour kicked off in the Ivory Coast with a significant innovation, the first ever tournament in Africa involving a reigning world champion. Magnus Carlsen duly triumphed in the scores
How do Britain’s pubs get their names? | The SpectatorThe Spectator - David ButterfieldAn easy one: what links Jack Straw’s Castle, The Labouring Boys and The Jolly Taxpayer? No, not the parliamentary expenses scandal of yesteryear, but the weird and whimsical world of British pub names.
Brown study | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Neil BrownYou liked Pink Batts? You’ll love Funny Money! Why? Well, I am now convinced that the Liberal party has gone completely mad. How else could you describe the extraordinary policy, announced in the death
Jackson Pollock The stormy lives of Jack the Dripper and the Wife with the Knife | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Stephen BayleyA stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable traffic was on a mainline between Paris and New York, with modest sidings in Barcelona
Gender Cross about cross-dressing? | The SpectatorThe Spectator - David van GendWhere is the parental rage to protect our children from an ideologically creepy Labor-Green government? Mums and dads across the country look set to elect a party that has vowed to impose the kooky notion
Australian Universities On aspirational edubabble | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Kevin DonnellyThe Melbourne Declaration published in 2008 is the road map that education ministers and state, territory and commonwealth bureaucracies have been using for the last 11 years to inform school education
Trump Administration Trump’s Iran strategy: Keep your enemies close and your hawks closer | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Daniel McCarthyDonald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser is a lifelong war hawk who, unlike Trump, was a diehard supporter of the Iraq War. Now has
Hiroshima Where were you when you read John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’? | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Stephen PhillipsMr Straight Arrow: The Career of John Hersey, Author of Hiroshima Jeremy Treglown Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If any occur, there’s
Fleabag (TV Series) Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Lee LangleyThe Polyglot Lovers Lina Wolff, translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s #MeToo Medusa is a bad hair day from Hades | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Laura FreemanMedusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and splitting at the ends. The premise is promising. This Medusa story is a Perseus prequel:
The mosque where it’s the men who make the tea | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Kate ChisholmOn returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one side, only allowed to look on from an angle, unable to contemplate the full mystery of the space
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Honor ClerkWorking in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla on her return to Britain after D-Day. There was something very moving in seeing the bare navigational
Language ‘Bolection’ and how the language of architecture was moulded | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Dot WordsworthA pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful and aesthetic purposes): gadroon, astragal, larmier and rabbet, but none
Container Terminals 2408: End of the line | The SpectatorThe Spectator - FieldfareUnclued lights name a man born on 18 May; his position; his son; and (singly or correctly paired, two of two words) some of his predecessors. One unclued light does double duty. 1 Listless and irrational
Scott Morrison Simon Collins | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Simon CollinsIn a normal year, Easter is the only time when eggs play anything other than a nutritional part in Australian life. But this being an election year, and many voters being more than usually exercised by
Laundry Willy Loman would have been fine if he’d worked in a laundry: Death of a Salesman reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Lloyd EvansColour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to believe that an ordinary African-American chap living in Brooklyn in 1928 might have owned
Jofra Archer The fans make British football what it is – stop fleecing them | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Roger AltonIt is always possible to tell the difference between a bunch of Manchester City fans and auditions for the latest Dolce & Gabbana commercial. And in that uproarious packed stand at Brighton on Sunday,
Gratitude Gratitude lessons show Eton is losing its way | The SpectatorThe Spectator - James Delingpole‘Repeat after me, gentlemen: “Thank you for not letting me into your Oxbridge college because I belong to the wrong social class and I have been too well taught.’’ ’ I do hope they include this catechism
W.G. Sebald From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Jean McNeilEast Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark Cocker, Sarah Perry, to name but a few. Towering over them all is ghost
Pink Floyd A Saturday-night variety show: Take That at the O2 reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Michael HannBeing old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take That were still a boy band in the early 1990s, as opposed to a man band, the idea that in middle age they
Enfield to 2405: Satanic | The SpectatorThe SpectatorDEVILS at 33D (its ‘essence’ is ‘EVIL’) is linked with ‘Malevolence’ (13) and ‘Roguish’ (19) and Devil’s CANDLESTICK (1), ON HORSEBACK (3), LIVERY (7), DOOR (14), SHOESTRINGS (17), ELBOW (27), APPLES and
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Sam LeithIt has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal Lecter in it was 1974. So, ‘hotly anticipated’ is probably the phrase. The good news for
Unforgotten person | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Stephen LoosleyA newly-elected Australian Prime Minister was pleased to receive a letter of congratulations from Australia’s longest serving PM, Sir Robert Menzies. The new PM replied warmly: Dear Sir Robert, I was moved
Judo It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game | The SpectatorThe Spectator - Alan JuddThese two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti focuses on Vladimir Putin himself, his background, aims, tactics and
Electric Vehicles Will more babies be called Archie now the royals have chosen it? | The SpectatorThe SpectatorWill more children be called Archie following the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son? How have other names fared after being picked by royalty? — George was the 6th most popular boy’s name 2012,
