Swords of honour
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish…
Wilde about the boy
The prodigious brilliance, blaring public ruin, dismal martyrdom and posthumous glory of Oscar Wilde’s reputation are almost too familiar. The…
Dead poets’ society
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Fear of freedom
There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is…
Opéra bouffe in New Hampshire
There ought to be a comic opera about the Bretton Woods conference — Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face, about Margaret,…
A later beginner
‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings…
Elder statesman of the Republic of Letters
Even Spectator book reviewers have to concede that their craft is inferior to the creative travail of authors. Henry James…
The good companion
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
Tireless tuft-hunting
The novelist David Plante is French-Québécois by ancestry, grew up in a remote Francophone parish in Yankee New England and…
Gay abandon
Richard Davenport-Hines on the charmed, dizzy world of the multi-talented Colette
Escapism for the gullible
The two opening volumes of Margaret Atwood’s trilogy have sold over a million copies. One of them managed to be…
A pioneer at heart
Richard Davenport-Hines on the tomboy from Red Cloud whose evocation of the vast, unforgiving landscape of the prairies is unrivalled
