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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.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Philip Patrick |Maggie Fergusson |Alexander Larman |Cindy Yu
In a dramatic and unannounced move, South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law on Tuesday in a live broadcast on YTN television.
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Dec 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Maggie Fergusson |Alexander Larman |Adrian Pascu-Tulbure |Sara Wheeler
I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of “real” wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a quarter of a century on, while friends’ MDF shelving droops like cables between telegraph poles, ours remains beautifully strong and straight.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Maggie Fergusson
How do you envisage a prison library? The one at HMP Wandsworth is commodious, with deep chairs and shelves packed with books to cover the tastes of 1,562 men. Whereas on the wings there is relentless shouting, slamming, jangling of keys, the library is tranquil. Former librarian Javier Carabello once told me, “I try to make it a little piece of paradise.” And so it is. But here’s the rub.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | A.S.H. Smyth |Maggie Fergusson |Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Caspar Henderson
Anyone reading this review will know a few fundamentals of the Smileyverse: spymaster George Smiley is podgy, spectacled, middle-aged, soft-spoken, wears ill-fitting clothes, can vanish in a crowd and is routinely cuckolded by his wife over the course of all “his” novels. Thanks to the success of John le Carré’s novels about him, the Smiley canon is now (we might assume) unchangeable: so, making a virtue of necessity, novelist Nick Harkaway has gone back to his Golden Age.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Neal Pollack |Brian Martin |Philip Patrick |Maggie Fergusson
I played my last hand of poker on an innocuous Saturday afternoon in October. My pocket Kings lost to 4-7 offsuit. They shouldn’t have been in the hand at all, but I still did everything wrong at the end, and there went $500 to some sweaty moron directly to my right. “Clock me out,” I said to the dealer, my hands shaking. They’d seated me at the table right by the door, so I at least was able to contain my temper tantrum until I got outside.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Maggie Fergusson
IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, when Timothy Radcliffe was Prior of Blackfriars in Oxford, he was sometimes invited to preach to undergraduates at Sunday Mass. The chaplaincy was always fairly full, but once word got out that “Father Tim” was coming, it was packed. Here was a preacher of thrilling contradictions: orthodox but open-minded, humorous but deadly serious.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
thetablet.co.uk | Maggie Fergusson
Church decisions can sometimes be hard to comprehend, but in appointing Timothy Radcliffe a cardinal Pope Francis seems to have scored a bullseye. IN THE MID-EIGHTIES, when Timothy Radcliffe was Prior of Blackfriars in Oxford, he was sometimes invited to preach to undergraduates at Sunday Mass. The chaplaincy was always fairly full, but once word got out that “Father Tim” was coming, it was packed.
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Aug 14, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Maggie Fergusson
Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman Doubleday, pp.307, 22 I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal.
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Aug 13, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Maggie Fergusson
Text size Line Spacing Comments Share Share Maggie Fergusson Imperfections in wood can make for the loveliest carvings Linkedin Messenger Email Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman Callum Robinson Doubleday, pp. 307, £22 I am married to a wood snob. When we bought our house in 1999, my husband insisted that all the shelves (he is an antiquarian book dealer, so there are miles of them) should be made of ‘real’ wood, with not an inch of Medium Density Fibreboard. The price made me squeal. But a...
