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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Amy Wilentz |Freddy Gray |Thomas Lambert |Juan Villasmil
For a politician known for his ability to shock, Donald Trump managed to outdo himself with his baseless claim during last year’s presidential debate that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing, butchering and eating household pets. Regardless of this racist lie — new Haitian immigrants to Ohio do not eat people’s pets and are in the main perfectly respectable — Haiti itself is a mess and a good place to flee.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Michael Farr |Julie Burchill |Philip Hensher |Thomas Lambert
Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school was on a Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, but boringly in the subscriptions department. His mind was set on becoming a top foreign correspondent like some of the leading names of the 1920s.
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Nov 27, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Thomas Lambert
Childish Literature Fitzcarraldo, pp.216, 12.99 Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Thomas Lambert
Serious books about fatherhood are hard to come by; indeed, next to distinguished literary mothers such as Rachel Cusk, Sheila Heti, Jacqueline Rose, and Elena Ferrante, the male sex is beginning to look decidedly inarticulate. In his new, genre-blurring work Childish Literature, the Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra seeks to right this imbalance.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Helen Barrett |Sean Rayment |Ben Domenech |Thomas Lambert
At the Pacific Design Center Gallery in Los Angeles, artists have created an imaginary enormo-conurbation into which humanity’s billions have been herded, surrendering what’s left of the planet to wilderness. Views of Planet City, the resulting temporary exhibition, is all Blade Runner-esque, purple-neon cityscapes in miniature, VR games and costumes melding world cultures into one. The show riffs on Edward O.
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Nov 19, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Max Jeffery |Thomas Lambert |Gavin Mortimer |Ben Domenech
Dan Peña has a picture of Adolf Hitler on his wall, but not any old picture. You know, not a simple portrait with Bavarian hills in the background, or a snap of the Führer doting on Helga Goebbels, Joseph’s daughter. No, Pena has a Hitler collage — Nazis marching through Nuremberg, a swastika blotting out the sky, hellfire on the horizon and, the final layer, a red and murderous photograph of the man himself superimposed on to the right-hand side. ‘Allegedly I used to hit my students in the 1990s.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Mary Wakefield |Thomas Lambert |Alexander Larman |Ben Domenech
It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatized that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making — a patchwork of Harris/Walz ballot papers, maybe — but I know better than to make a light-hearted enquiry because this is not an ordinary quilt.
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Nov 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Thomas Lambert |Mary Wakefield |Alexander Larman |Scott Bradfield
On Friday November 13, 2015, France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theater, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, ninety people massacred.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
spectator.com.au | Thomas Lambert
V13: Chronicle of a Trial Fern Press, pp.320, 20 On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
spectator.co.uk | Thomas Lambert
On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred.
