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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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Dec 2, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Alex Peake-Tomkinson |Paul Wood |Roger Kimball |Sara Wheeler
Eliza Clark’s first novel, Boy Parts, centered on a self-destructive woman taking explicit photographs of men. Her second, Penance, was about a journalist constructing a “definitive account” of a seaside murder. Last year she was named one of Granta’s best young novelists; but she has now produced a sadly uneven short story collection, She’s Always Hungry. These eleven tales do not hang together thematically, aside from a broad emphasis on the corporeal.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Svitlana Morenets |Sara Wheeler |Grace Curley |Joseph Moreno
After the Harris/Walz campaign blew over $1 billion, its top managers joined their first interview post-election on Pod Save America to explain what went wrong. Their excuses range from having less than 107 days instead of a year and a half, the fact that Harris wasn’t elected via the “traditional” route, the “political environment” — meaning Biden and Kamala’s poor approval ratings — along with Donald Trump, Donald Trump and Donald Trump.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Svitlana Morenets |Sara Wheeler |Mark Galeotti |Dylan Colligan
Not since the summer of the 2022 invasion have Russian troops been making more progress in Ukraine. Last month alone, they took almost 200 square miles in the Donetsk region. Just fifteen miles now separate the Russian forces from entering the Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. If Russia succeeds, a sixth region will be swallowed by hostilities. What’s changed? Russia’s ranks are swelling with highly paid contractors and fresh North Korean reinforcements, while Ukraine’s forces are thinning fast.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Sara Wheeler |Jonathan Miller |Alexander Larman |Justin Brierley
What makes men and women climb high? Most commonly, according to Daniel Light, “the prosecution of science or the advancement of empire.” It might also be general flag-waving or just personal fulfilment, as in the case of “private traveler” Godfrey Vigne, who opened his English eyes to the wonder of the Karakoram in the baleful 1930s.
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Mar 9, 2024 | 
yahoo.com | Sara Wheeler
Men have behaved violently towards women since our common ancestors first stood upright, and I know whereof I speak. Elizabeth Flock has written an important and deeply moving book revealing how this kind of violence manifests itself today in different cultural settings, and what we are doing about it. An award-winning American journalist, who reveals on the first page that she herself is a rape victim, Flock shapes The Furies around three stories.
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Jan 28, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Charles Lipson |Sara Wheeler |Jenny Colgan |Owen Matthews
Given just how unpopular illegal immigration is, it is stunning to see both the likely nominees for president fumbling the issue. That’s political malpractice. For Biden, the malpractice consists not only in keeping the border open, which is already killing him in the polls, but in resisting the strongest Republican proposals to close it. Every time Republican congressional leaders visit the White House to negotiate, they come away empty handed.
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Oct 6, 2023 | 
thetimes.co.uk | Sara Wheeler
“Do we all remember ourselves as actors of our own lives?” Robyn Davidson asks in her memoir. Although Unfinished Woman zigzags elliptically through most of the author’s life, childhood exerts a centripetal force. Davidson was born in 1950 on her father’s 15,000-acre cattle station in “nearly-but-not-quite-outback” Port Stanley, on the western edge of Queensland’s Darling Downs. She left home at 18 for a boho life in Sydney.
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May 17, 2023 | 
telegraph.co.uk | Sara Wheeler
Lounging on a carpet on the desert sands of Gharameel, I looked at the stars. Locust-like insects whirred, invisible. “See?” asked Rawa, my stargazing guide. “Three ladies following a coffin.” She pulled a sweater over her red T-shirt, picked up a laser pointer and traced the night air with a thin beam. The top of the coffin aligned with the North Star. “That light showed the way,” Rawa said, “for desert wanderers.
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Apr 9, 2023 | 
ca.sports.yahoo.com | Sara Wheeler
sara wheeler athens - Sara Wheeler/GettyMy job at a small publishing house involved collecting book orders and riding the tram to downtown bookshops from the firm’s three-room office in Mets, an old district in the south of Athens. The office was at the top of two steep flights of outdoor steps, and the tram stop was at the bottom, opposite the Temple of Olympian Zeus, scavenging ground for hundreds of cats.
