Writing
Why you should never trust a travel writer
After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all…
Beware taking up running in your fifties
Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the…
Don’t write off literary fiction yet
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good…
How I took on Microsoft’s AI – and won
‘This is an assault!’ I screamed in my study, oblivious to the fact that my husband had a guest downstairs.…
The exquisite vanity of the male sports writer
A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he…
The lure of the spy novel
Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film…
The expensive business of quoting poetry
Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of…
Pity the restaurant critic
An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the…
What will become of George Orwell’s archives?
The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the…
A.A. Milne and the torturous task of writing
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month…
Letter from Thailand
Many of my friends, stranded by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, have temporarily given up their film projects and…
Down the rabbit hole
Don’t cancel Beatrix Potter
The reactionary bohemian
Modestly brilliant, dedicatedly hedonistic — Jeremy Clarke was a complete one-off
Diary
The wonderful Barbara Kingsolver wrote that hope is something you should not admire from a distance, but rather live inside…
Letter from Mongolia
The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle…
Written out
How success kills friendships
Blood lines
Where does a mother’s history end and a daughter’s begin?
A vroom of one’s own
Oh how I loved my old Mini
Diary
I met a Canadian couple for lunch in Edinburgh. They were from Vancouver – he a judge, she an opera…
Sound made visible
What particularly excites Silvia Ferrara, the author of The Greatest Invention, is not language per se but writing – that…
My crowning achievement
It’s fairly commonplace for people to wonder what, if anything, they’ll be remembered for. I’m going to be 59 later…
Finding a voice
Howard Jacobson, who turns 80 this year, published his first novel aged 40. Since then he has produced roughly a…
The Spectator’s Notes
We are always cautioned against comparing a modern political event with those that led up to the second world war.…
