This Be The Best
In 2013 I entered this in one of the Spectator’s poetry competitions, if memory serves a version of a well-known poem endeavouring to convey the precisely opposite message. With apologies…
Tag: spectator
November 12th 1988: Two contrasting letters from Kingsley Amis
In “The Letters of Kingsley Amis”, edited by Zachary Leader, we find two contrasting and yet in their own way characteristic letters from Kingsley Amis from this day thirty years…
“Biography is a thoroughly reprehensible genre”
Only a few days after I made a rather grumpy comment on the quality of the Spectator now, comes this piece by Roger Lewis on the dodginess of biography. Lewis…
“Democracy is a thing which is always breaking down through the complexity of civilisation” – GK Chesterton, Allan Massie and complexity
. As I have recently written, I am reading a collection of Allan Massie’s Life and Letters columns from the Spectator, which is full of shrewd judgments. In particular there…
Sheer “determination to live by the will” : Allan Massie on Widmerpool
I haven’t read much of The Spectator lately; it seems to have less and less of interest. Once, regardless of one’s political views, the literary quality of the magazine was…
Séamus Sweeney 