-
2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Lee Langley |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
Whisper it, very quietly, but the now 87-year-old author Thomas Pynchon is having something of a moment in 2025. Not only has his 1990 novel Vineland supposedly served as the loose inspiration for the eagerly awaited new Paul Thomas Anderson-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration One Battle After Another,but the near-impossible has been announced: Pynchon will publish a new novel, entitled Shadow Ticket,around the time of the movie’s release.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Hugh Schofield |Lee Langley |Gavin Mortimer |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
What possible crime has the award-winning novelist Boualem Sansal committed that merits being locked away for three months by the Algerian police? Listen to the Algerian government — and its cheerleaders on social media — and the answer appears to be that he is at best a stooge for the French far-right, at worst an outright traitor. Friends of the man paint another picture: a gently spoken free-thinker with the courage to speak his mind.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Kate Andrews |Roger Kimball |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Freddy Gray
Donald Trump’s address to Congress last night was made up of his greatest hits since returning to the Oval Office. Just over six weeks’ worth of public policy filled a 100-minute speech in what is being reported this morning as one of the longest Congressional addresses in history. The President touched on practically every topic, from the Ukraine war to buying Greenland. “America is back,” he told the joint-session, to cheers of “USA”.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Freddy Gray |Kara Kennedy
Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night was the most powerful, rousing, and pointed of any presidential address in decades. The first line captured the theme of the night. “America is back . . .
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Freddy Gray |Ben Domenech |Toby Young
Welcome to Cockburn’s Diary, a new newsletter from The Spectator sent twice a week from the nation’s capital. Your intrepid correspondent will keep you informed about all the whispers circulating around town. Coming to your inboxes on Tuesdays and Fridays…President Donald Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress tonight — but don’t you dare call it a State of the Union; that term is reserved for speeches given in non-inauguration years.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Freddy Gray |James Cahill |Susie Mesure
Anne Tyler, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989, is much admired by writers, ranging from Hanya Yanagihara to Nick Hornby, for novels such as The Accidental Tourist (1985) and A Spool of Blue Thread (2015). In Three Days in June, Tyler’s twenty-fifth novel, Gail Baines is not having a good day. An assistant headmistress, she is expecting to be promoted when the headmistress asks to speak to her.
-
2 months ago | 
the-tls.co.uk | Dennis Duncan |Oliver Balch |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Muireann Maguire
The John Rylands Library in central Manchester is both a national treasure and a national treasury. Housed in a church-like late-Victorian gothic building is one of the country’s largest collections of rare books and manuscripts outside Oxbridge and the British Library. Not just books and papers, but also objects – a lock of William Wordsworth’s hair, and of Marcel Proust’s, Mrs Gaskell’s sewing scissors, the lining of Walt Whitman’s hat.
-
Dec 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Brian Martin |Philip Patrick |Maggie Fergusson |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
Emily Wilson, the distinguished translator of Homer, has remarked that Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls about the Trojan War is a distinctly feminist book. Renowned for her first world war Regeneration trilogy, Barker has now written The Voyage Home, a powerful novel about the first part of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. She takes the infrastructure of legend and invests it with brutal realism. Agamemnon’s return home to Mycenae after ten years of war is told entirely from the points of view of women.
-
Dec 2, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Stephen MIller |Stephen Miller |Rory Sutherland |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Julie Burchill
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in 2017, there was about a week-long news cycle between the media and White House press secretary Sean Spicer regarding the size of the inaugural crowd. The exchange was first of many pedantic battles between Spicer and the White House press corps that benefited the American public in no way whatsoever.
-
Dec 2, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Julie Burchill |Rory Sutherland |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Paul Wood
I’m not the biggest Donald Trump fan, so I surprised myself by being pleased when he won the election so conclusively. There was a serious reason for this. Though I’m thoroughly for abortion and against sex pests, it’s no good the Democrats pretending to be the party of women’s rights when they’re in favor of allowing cheating males into female sport and perverted men into female prisons.
