Indice dei contenuti per 10 January 2026 in The Spectator

Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power, power that has underpinned the rules-based international order that protected America’s allies for decades. Now those allies fear that the rules-based order is as much a smoking ruin as Maduro’s Caracas compound. European hysteria is, however, misplaced. President Trump has not inaugurated a new era of disorder, he has responded to realities about which European elites have been in denial. The post-war international order has been crumbling for more than a decade. And British governments have been enablers of that process. One of the most determined users of hard power in subverting every restraint has been communist China. British policy, accelerated under this government, has supported China’s economic rise and…

With the close of 2025 I crowned a tumultuous year in which I got married, moved house and saw Evelyn, my belligerent character, leave Coronation Street after six years, heading to virtual university at 79 to study law with special emphasis on dogs. The Street may have gone very gay and very murderous lately, but I hope canine-obsessed Evelyn left her mark on its cobbles. I loved my sojourn there, so she’ll be back and she’ll be ugly. My last vainglorious appearance of 2025 was in the Boxing Day episode of ITV’s The Masked Singer, where the panel failed to guess the identity of the seething, exhausted old goose, wobbling and warbling blindly around the stage. I was voted out in favour of Dermot O’Leary dressed as a sprig of…

The house lights dim again: Willy Loman, Vanya, Leartalk to the dark before their eyes– while you glance sideways at your neighbours,who’ve brought their lovers,husbands, wives to sit beside them (or to occupy their minds).What do they want to see? The play goes on,into its last deciding act. A few will leave early:their spirits rise apologetically and drift toward the doors.Some women weep, some men feel anger at their own bald ageas Lear is lost in grief.Applause is ferocious at the end.How can they leave? There must be more.What’s next? The pages of the programme have gone blank.‘Shall we go round to see the people in the show?’To find the dressing rooms empty, bare.Others, wiser, luckier,head home.…

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it, Jesus Christ stands alongside Imam Mahdi, a prophesied messianic figure who many Muslims believe will appear with him during the End Times to restore peace and justice to the world. There is only one Venezuelan – the late president Hugo Chavez – among the six smaller figures on the mural. Three are Iranian, including Qasem Soleimani, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps elite Quds Force, killed by a US airstrike in 2020. One is an Iraqi commander killed in the same strike, and the last is Lebanese, Imad Mughniyeh, a founder of Islamic Jihad in Lebanon and number two in Hezbollah until his assassination in 2008. ‘The way…

Last summer, the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced a clause to the Crime and Policing Bill that will decriminalise all abortions. Enshrining this ‘right’ into law will mean that a mother could end the life of a baby a week, a day or even an hour before it is due to be born, without facing legal consequences. The bill will go to the House of Lords this month. If there had been proper debate over the proposal, rather than introducing it alongside 1,482 other amendments, parliamentarians might have spotted the flaw: the proposed legislation will enable sex-selective abortions. The NHS normally delays the point at which parents are entitled to know their child’s sex until the 20-week scan, shortly before abortion currently becomes illegal. As there will no longer be…

It’s a personal delight that on 29 September 1829, the first day of Robert Peel’s new force, the first warrant number issued by the Metropolitan Police was to a William Atkinson. I’m less happy that officer number one was sacked after just four hours on duty, for being drunk. As the Met approaches its 200th birthday, the state of it would embarrass even my namesake. The force is ineffective, scandal-prone and discredited. Shoplifting is up 104 per cent since 2020. Knife crime has reached a 14-year high. In 2023, a review by Louise Casey declared the Met riddled with institutional sexism, racism and bullying. Many recent studies have found that more than half of Londoners do not trust their police. Rather than get its house in order, the Met has…

For many years now we have all been agonising over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlour game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Micro-plastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton pants into the bin. But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: The Great Sex Recession. Just before Christmas, the Telegraph conducted its own…

Of all the heavyweight books I’ve ever been asked to review, one that most influenced my view of how the world works was Why Nations Fail (2012) by two American academics, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson. Their theory, drawn from a broad sweep of history, is that all state regimes fit patterns that are either ‘extractive’ or ‘inclusive’. To be inclusive is to be egalitarian in access to resources and rewards, and responsive to the will of the people. To be extractive is to rule despotically in the interest of corrupt elites, often profiting from ruthless extraction of natural resources. Inclusive economies are prone to occasional crisis but capable of self-renewal; extractive economies are destined to fail. Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro and Hugo Chavez, who brought their country to…

Everything Under the Sun: The Complete Guide to Pink Floydby Mike CormackThe History Press, £25, pp. 416 Pink Floyd Shine On: The Definitive Oral Historyby Mark BlakeNew Modern, £25, pp. 400 The English rock band Pink Floyd was founded 60 years ago in Cambridge. Reading two new books about them, it struck me how much time and place matter to their story. Now in their eighties, the surviving members remain a product of the milieu in which they were formed: middle class, semi-boho, comfortably numb. First they moved to London; then to the outer reaches of the cosmos. After that they circled the planet for decades, recollecting the emotions of their youth in both tranquillity and anger. You can take the multi-million-selling, emotionally repressed space cadets out of Cambridge… Broadly…

The Uncool: A Memoirby Cameron Crowe 4th Estate, £17.99, pp. 317 The filmmaker Cameron Crowe had the coolest childhood. Growing up in California, he started writing for Rolling Stone magazine at the age of 15. His big break came in 1973, when he had the chance to interview the Allman Brothers Band, then one of America’s biggest rock groups, for a cover piece. For days he tagged along with the rockers on tour, winning their trust with his passion for music and open, honest, moon-shaped face, while phoning his mother every evening to assure her that he wasn’t taking drugs. Finally he earned an interview with the troubled Greg Allman himself, who, shirtless on a bed, spoke about the loss of his big brother Duane in a motorcycle accident and…

Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Futureby Nick FosterCanongate, £22, pp.337 Half of the British political world thinks we are insufficiently scared about the present; the other half thinks we are insufficiently excited about the future. The latter is a non-partisan movement, or at least a cross-partisan one. From fully-automated luxury communism, through centrist Abundance, to the more right-coded Looking for Growth, all the way to Anglo-futurism (somehow paradoxically simultaneously futurist and reactionary), policy thinkers are rejecting incrementalism and learned helplessness and articulating provocative future visions that could – with a tweaked planning system and Natural England ritually immolated – lie just a couple of parliaments away. All these movements could usefully learn from Could Should Might Don’t. It is less clear that anyone else will. Nick…

Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder ClubBBC2 Can You Keep a Secret?BBC1 Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all those film trailers beginning ‘In a world…’. ‘The London Thames,’ she intoned as gruffly and menacingly as she could, ‘winding silently through the capital. But in Victorian times...’ dramatic pause ‘... it had a sinister side.’ She then introduced ‘a story that has haunted me since I first heard it’ – possibly, you couldn’t help thinking, from a TV producer keen to find her another true-crime project. In the late 1880s, a serial killer dismembered several women while also taunting the police and never being found. Yet, this was not Jack the Ripper, but ‘the Thames torso murderer’: somebody, Lucy…

After two weeks of us heating the house to the temperature my nearly 90-year-old father wanted it, the door to the guest bedroom would no longer shut. The central heating had swollen the wood so much that it had to be planed down. The builder boyfriend and I had been lying in bed each night with the radiators in our bedroom off and the windows wide open. I’d venture out into the hallway at 3 a.m. to investigate why we were still too hot and a wall of heat would hit me. The thermostat I had left on tick-over was rammed to the far right once more and the boiler was at warp speed. I told my father he might be parboiling us all like frogs, but he refused to…

Magnus Carlsen’s relationship with Fide is frayed, all the more following the spat at the 2024 World Rapid and Blitz Championships in New York, when the world no. 1 was penalised for wearing jeans. The Norwegian said it was his good relations with the Qatari organisers, and his domestic fans, for whom following the event has become a seasonal tradition, that motivated him to participate at the 2025 event, held in Doha between Christmas and New Year. Carlsen dominated the rapid event, finishing a full point clear of the field, despite suffering an early setback on the second day of play, when he was beaten by the Russian grandmaster Vladislav Artemiev, who eventually took the silver medal. Vladislav Artemiev-Magnus Carlsen World Rapid Championship, Doha, 2025 Black to play, position after…

On 1 January, the NHS announced it would be including a chickenpox vaccine in the bundle of inoculations given to one-year-olds, henceforth known as the MMRV, where V stands for varicella. Most people in my circle reacted badly to this news, having become vaccine sceptics after the overselling of the Covid jabs, but not me. Twenty years ago I lobbied the government to do just this. I don’t think people realise how dangerous chickenpox can be – and not just for adults. Two days after my son Ludo was born, Caroline discovered a spot on her chest that her mum quickly diagnosed as chickenpox. That wasn’t great for Caroline, who began to feel unwell, but it was potentially deadly for Ludo, because there was a chance she’d passed on the…

Q. Every so often we’re invited to our friends’ house for lunch or dinner. It’s close by and the house is beautiful, warm and comfortable. But whatever time we’re asked to arrive for dinner or lunch, we don’t sit down to eat until at least two hours later. The back door of the house enters on to the kitchen and without fail a raw chicken or unpeeled potatoes will be sitting there when we arrive. How our friends came to believe that this much time spent with each other before the meal was a good idea is a mystery. Mary, how can I let them know it’s entirely unacceptable without hurting their feelings? – M.G., Connecticut, USA A. Next time they invite you, gush that you are longing to see…

Peter Mandelson says Europe should take Trump’s plan for Greenland seriously on p12. He was Britain’s ambassador to the US from February to September 2025. Arthur Kay reveals the truth about ‘independent bookshops’ on p26. He runs the Gilded Acorn bookshop and is also the founder of Skyroom and Bio-Bean. Helen Barrett, who writes about David Bowie on p30, is a former editor at the FT and freelance writer and editor. She is currently working on a book about the Beatles. Andy Miller is co-host of the podcast Backlisted and author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. He writes about Pink Floyd on p34. Sean McGlynn reviews a new work on Richard the Lionheart on p38. He is a historian and the author of Robin Hood: A True Legend.…

When Bridget Phillipson arrived at the Department for Education, she knew which issue would define her tenure. Within days, she was facing dozens of new Labour MPs grilling her about how she planned to overhaul the system for special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). ‘From the outset we have gone out there to speak to the parliamentary Labour party,’ says an ally. ‘We know that this is a key postbag issue.’ Over the past ten years, the number of claims for special needs has exploded. A fifth of all children in England are now reported to have SEND; in Scotland, 43 per cent of pupils have some sort of additional learning need. For some policymakers, this reflects positive trends: a better awareness of mental health conditions and a shift in…

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker to justice in an American court of law, something which no amount of human rights declarations, international law or indictments in the international criminal court were able to achieve. It took President Trump deciding it was in America’s interests to helicopter Nicolas Maduro to face justice, and this is the awful truth that Europe’s political leaders are coming to terms with: Trump has the means and the will and they don’t. Europe’s growing geopolitical impotence in the world is becoming the issue now, and histrionics about Greenland is confirming this brutal reality. The future of Greenland is being misunderstood. Trump is not going to ‘invade’ it. He doesn’t need to.…

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer, to mock the then bipartisan consensus which supported George W. Bush’s war on terror abroad while pushing open borders at home. Or, as Sailer also put it: ‘Bomb them over there and indulge them over here.’ Back then, such analysis was generally dismissed as the preserve of white supremacist cranks. Now, it’s fair to say that Sailerite thinking animates the spirit of the second Donald Trump administration. Disrupt the world, deport the world. That’s the order of the day. Since America’s stunning attack on Venezuela last weekend, almost everybody has had a stab at revealing Trump’s real intentions – including, naturally, Trump and his talking heads. It’s all about securing…

Following America’s extraordinary raid on Venezuela last week, Donald Trump has pointed to Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, as the territory he plans to turn his attention to next, staking a claim he has made repeatedly since his return to the White House. Trump said this week that America needs Greenland ‘for national security. Right now’. He told reporters he is ‘very serious’ in his intent. The US President might be claiming Greenland in the name of peace and stability, but there is every chance his neo-imperial attempts to see off the threat from China and Russia will backfire. Will his actions herald the return to a land-grabbing, power-flaunting global order like that of the 19th century? Crucially for Europe, could Vladimir Putin see America’s actions in…

All this winter, until New Year’s Eve, and for the first time since I started keeping llamas, Vera, Ann and Lynn were happily grazing on grass that was still growing. They were managing without hay. Something seems to be happening to our climate. Global warming alarmism is not for me. I’ve never pitched in, fists flying, to this fray. One would want scientific expertise or new information – and I lack both. I’ve grown to distrust the wildly divergent prophecies of the climate change warriors as much as I distrust their adversaries in the ‘nothing to worry about’ camp. So for the purposes of this column, let’s sideline that discussion after summarising as follows: climate change does appear to be a fact; it may be cyclical or a fixed trend;…

Independent bookshops remain some of Britain’s loveliest places. Quaint, charming, precarious, they are a bulwark against blandness and offer refuge in an age of doom-scrolling. The bookseller stacking the shelves is likely to be local, almost certainly poorly paid and a bit moth-eaten. I should know – I own an independent bookshop. We are a flock of sheep, which is why it has proved so easy for a wolf to slip into our clothing. Walk down a high street today and you may well pass a bookshop that looks just right. Handwritten recommendation cards. Tastefully curated tables. Knowledgeable booksellers. The name over the door reassuringly local. Nothing here suggests scale, leverage or distant ownership. You may feel a small glow at having rejected Amazon. Sadly, that glow would be misplaced,…

Sean McGlynn enjoys the heroic legends surrounding Richard Coeur de Lion Scott Bradfield explores the horrifying fallout of California’s water wars Christian Wolmar celebrates the spectacular ventilation shafts hiding in plain sight in Britain Philip Clark recalls the anxiety of being a page-turner for a four-hour composition Michael Hann watches John Lydon take two fag breaks during his own gig Lloyd Evans discovers the new Operation Mincemeat…

Landscape with Landscapeby Gerald Murnane And Other Stories, £14.99, pp. 316 Gerald Murnane’s Landscape with Landscape opens with a splendidly disgruntled preface. The book is a collection of six longish stories and was originally published in 1985, when it was panned by a reviewer. ‘Some writers may claim not to be affected by reviews or even not to read them,’ he observes in his preface: ‘I make no such claim.’ And he explains how this brutal notice (‘I call to mind easily some of the nastiest passages’) led to poor sales and the disappearance of the collection, his fourth book. There is some comedy in this alongside the spiky pathos. Murnane is about as close to review-proof as any writer can get. Now 86, he is often mentioned as a…

One of Usby Elizabeth Day4th Estate, £18.99, pp. 352 This is the sixth novel and tenth book overall by the highly successful journalist and podcaster Elizabeth Day. She hit her stride as an author with her third novel Paradise City (2015), which was leaps and bounds ahead of her first two in terms of narrative propulsion. Her next was what might be considered her breakout book, The Party (2017), after which came Magpie (2021). One of Us returns to the characters and story of The Party, but it can easily be read as a standalone. Day has said that the earlier novel was partly inspired by reading The Great Gatsby at the age of 12; and while she has conceded that no one can write like F. Scott Fitzgerald, it…

It’s too late now to say you are not old,the years gang up on you, they settle downlike locusts falling on a field of grain,the rustling noise you hear, that is their sound. How to be old: I’ll help you on the way.Stand straight. Be calm. Pretend you are a treeSpeak like a tree, only speak slow and clear. Speak only once. If words should scatterflashing their tails before they disappear,temporise, change the subject, no great matter – Enough, wrong tone: meaning to make amendsshould not have used this hieratic patterknew from the start that half I said was wrongpitching it for that By-Our-Lady play And yet, which half was false and which was true?After all, here am I, but where are you? Maybe a small charade would help: let’s…

Beare’s Chamber Music FestivalWigmore Hall TurandotRoyal Opera House, until 4 February The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one of those, and you’re walking a tightrope. Add further players and the issue is redundancy: you’d better know precisely what you want to do with those additional voices, because otherwise they’ll congeal like cold gravy. When it comes to the string octet – two string quartets fused together – only the 16-year-old Mendelssohn really cracked it, going all out for transparency, daring and youthful verve. The Romanian George Enescu took the opposite approach. His Octet of 1900 is chamber music as epic construction project, wrought from steel, not spindrift. ‘No engineer launching his first suspension bridge across a river…

What Remains? Canterbury’s Ancestors: Ethics, History & ScienceThe Beaney, Canterbury, until 26 March Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been asking themselves ever since European institutions began displaying bodies of the dead – notably Egyptian mummies – in the early 19th century. It’s the same question that continues to be posed today in Canterbury. Here, an exhibition at the Beaney House of Art & Knowledge chronicles and collates the significant archaeological discoveries in and around the city over recent decades. Finds that have unearthed skeletons of the city’s previous occupants – mostly Anglo-Saxon nobility and Roman soldiers and civilians from the 2nd and 3rd century AD. The question remains the same: what to do with these remains?…

We’re spoilt for choice in the Cotswolds. There’s a brilliant National Hunt trainer in every valley and the villages are stuffed with good pubs. In spite of competition from names synonymous with the biggest races – Jonjo O’Neill, Nigel Twiston-Davies and Kim Bailey, not to mention a stack of other talented operators – it’s Ben Pauling whose star is rising. I’ve been very fond of Ben since he was a nipper. We’re both sons of Chipping Norton farmers, so a SML (Sensible Monday Lunch) tends to be both a pleasure and also a disappointment that it isn’t a PFL. (You can work that out for yourself.) But where to meet? The Old Butchers in Stow-on-the-Wold is jolly good and the second oldest race sponsor in the country, Nick Clark, of…

For Competition 3431, you were invited to submit a passage in which Sherlock Holmes solves one of the great mysteries of our time. Many entries interpreted the ‘of our time’ bit quite loosely, with Holmes tackling the Princes in the Tower, the origins of Stonehenge and even the Big Bang. Nonetheless, after toying with pedantry, I decided to take the possibly generous line that some mysteries are for the ages and so still qualified – although in the event only one pre-21st-century mystery made the final cut. I was sorry not to have room for Richard Warren and Fay Dickinson, but the £25 vouchers go to the following. ‘I say, Holmes,’ said Watson, perusing the Daily Mail. ‘When is that Andrew chap going to get out of Royal Lodge? The…

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me – at the time of writing, before Jacob Bethell was belatedly allowed to unfurl his brilliance – it was the moving homage to the heroes of the Bondi massacre at the start of the Sydney Test. It was flawlessly executed, unlike a great deal of the cricket: a group of first responders, including paramedics, lifeguards, police and Ahmed al-Ahmed, the shopkeeper who disarmed one of the terrorists, were given a guard of honour as applause and cheers flooded the ground. If it didn’t bring a tear to the eye, check your pulse. Otherwise, what have we learned? The England bowling has often been shocking and toothless, with Matthew Potts, Brydon…

Kingsley Amis was obsessed with Scott’s on Mount Street, Mayfair, and he knew a lot about food. He ate himself to death. In his unwise James Bond continuation novel Colonel Sun – Ian Fleming also loved Scott’s – Amis had Bond ponder that ‘every meal taken in those severe but comfortable panelled rooms [is] a tiny victory over the new hateful London of steel and glass matchbox architecture’. Bond then presumably dropped his knickers, because there is as much projection in Amis and Fleming as there is in this column. Even so, I know how they feel about Scott’s. Mayfair is now the UAE with democracy and rain. It is gold and pink for toddler princes, and Scott’s, which is the colour of a Barbour, remains a tiny victory in…

‘Why doesn’t anyone do what you ask them to?’ enquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the subject, I should have thought. He was referring to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: ‘I am reaching out to you.’ But it has grown worse. Using the expression makes it sound as though the emailer is deranged. Reach out has for more than a century meant ‘to offer sympathy, support or assistance’ to people. Correlatively it can mean to seek those things. As Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has acquired the habit of issuing a Christmas message. For 2025 he said: ‘At this time of the year, which celebrates love and abundance, loss or hardship can feel…

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas Maduro and she replied: ‘I don’t know, Rod. Would you like to see my panties?’ This is the problem with AI – it is not intelligent and nor are the people who program it. I had told the company that I wanted my AI girlfriend to ask me interesting geographical and historic trivia questions and be au fait with Millwall’s injury-stricken line-up, as well as being able to chat knowledgeably about interesting issues of the day. What I get instead is a numbing void, other than those continual solicitations about seeing her panties. I dunno, perhaps I should accede in case there is some hidden wisdom written on them, possibly…

A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote for the Green party under its wonderful new leader, Zack Polanski. Bad as I tend to expect things to be, even I thought that surely things can’t be that bad. However I dutifully entered the terms ‘Polanski’ and ‘young women’ into Google, and promptly fell down a different rabbit hole. Defining my search terms a little more clearly, it turned out that my informant was correct. So badly deranged are the youngest cohort of female voters in this country that a third of them really do believe that they have found their saviour in a man who until recently promised that he had a technique to inflate women’s breasts through…

Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As a moral term ‘shame’ appears to have disappeared almost entirely from normal discourse (bar the self-satisfied ‘fat-shaming’). That tells us much about ourselves. Aristotle discusses the term in some depth. He does not see it as an active virtue, but rather as a ‘condition involving a range of feelings’, which he defines as: ‘A kind of pain and agitation concerning the class of evils, whether present, past or future, that seem to bring a person into disrespect’. His definition is well in tune with the evidence of ancient Greek literature, in which the presence or absence of shame puts your reputation at stake. Mythical heroes often challenged each other by…

When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly told her the speed limit in a 30mph zone was 80mph and then kept jerking the steering wheel to ‘correct’ her, even when she was trying to park. She told Which? that driving had gone ‘from a lifeline to a nightmare’. ‘I’ve seriously considered getting some old, beat-up car from five years ago that doesn’t have this technology,’ she said. Car safety features are boring and intrusive, like having a man with a clipboard and lanyard permanently in your backseat. Indeed, the Which? survey of more than 1,500 motorists found we are increasingly switching off all that ‘safety’ tech because it’s actually dangerous, distracting or useless. From automatic lane-assist steering adjustments to internal monitors…

No to Reform Sir: Perhaps because I have been candid about the Conservative party’s failures in office, I am mooted as being of interest to Reform by your political editor (‘14 questions for 2026’, 3 January). But acknowledging failures is not a prelude to defection; it is the necessary starting point of renewal. When Reform speaks of a ‘uniparty’, it implies that swapping politicians is enough. It is not. The crisis of the British state runs far deeper. Governments are in office, not power, because of the pernicious shift we have seen over the past 30 years from a political constitutionalism to a legal one. On immigration, human rights, energy policy, authority has been transferred from ministers accountable to parliament and the electorate to courts, regulators, quangos and other bodies…

David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death and Godby Peter OrmerodBloomsbury, £20, pp. 256 Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowieby Paul MorleyHeadline, £25, pp. 320 Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowieby Alexander LarmanNew Modern, £25, pp. 400 What did David Bowie mean by ‘No confessions/ No religion’ in his lyrics to ‘Modern Love’? Peter Ormerod proposes what at first seems an unlikely theory – that Bowie was talking about Gnosticism, the complex spiritual, though not religious, belief that God lies beyond the material world and that all humans carry a divine spark within. Ormerod admits that perceiving intellectual depths in a hit single sounds far-fetched – ‘an attempt to find weight in a scrap of fluff’. But he points out that Gnosticism, with…

The Burning Originby Daniele Mencarelli, translated by Octavian MacEwanEuropa Editions, £14.99, pp. 250 This terse, unsparing novel can be summed up thus: after nearly a decade’s absence, the successful designer Gabriele Bilancini returns home to suburban Rome, where he wrestles with an identity crisis. His family and friends – his intimates before he moved to Milan and raced up the social ladder – feel like shameful reminders of his proletarian origins, which he keeps hidden – in ‘the way you hide a sin’ – from the Milanese élite he is anxious to fit in with. In Milan,where he works and lives with his girlfriend Camilla, the daughter of his mentor, the celebrity designer Franco Zardi, Gabriele dresses smartly, limits lunch to ‘a salad with full protein’ and purges his speech…

Adventurous Vents: A Journey Through the Ventilation Shafts of Britainby Lucy Lavers, Judy Owens and Suzanna Prizeman Particular Books, £20, pp. 160 In the centre of London’s Paternoster Square there is a tall column on a heavy octagonal base that provides a few seats and shelter from the winds whipping around St Paul’s. If you look closely, you see a mishmash of styles, with the Corinthian column topped by a gold-covered flaming urn and various baroque flourishes. Passersby might be surprised to find such an ode to eclecticism amid the rather modern neoclassicism of what was a highly controversial development in 2008 that attracted the attention of the then Prince of Wales. What few of them will know is that the column is not just a decorative addition to a…

Every Last Fish: What Fish Do For Us and What We Do To Themby Rose GeorgeGranta, £20, pp. 320 The great American activist Aldo Leopold once argued that to be a modern environmentalist was to suffer a world of wounds as you endured the losses inflicted on one cherished organism after another. No one, then, can suffer more anguish than the campaigner for the world’s fishes. In this wide-ranging, heartfelt, meticulously assembled account of our oceans Rose George shows why. She tells us that there are four million fishing vessels worldwide, the most appallingly efficient belonging to China, the EU, Taiwan, Japan, Russia and the USA. It is primarily these giant industrial regimes that have driven four-fifths of the planet’s fishes to the edge of sustainable limits. Much of this…

Public Image Ltd: This Is Not The Last TourO2 Forum Kentish Town, and touring until 10 January Robert Plant’s Saving GraceRoyal Festival Hall Robert Plant and John Lydon were fixed in the public mind at the age of 20. Plant, a golden-haired lad who had grown up in Worcestershire, became the leonine singer of Led Zeppelin in 1968, a self-proclaimed ‘golden god’. Lydon, a scrawny kid from Holloway, who had been hospitalised for a year with meningitis as a child, became Johnny Rotten, and in 1976 helped deliver ‘the filth and the fury’ – as the Daily Mirror put it – on the nation’s TV screens as a quarter of the Sex Pistols. Both, it would be fair to say, have ambivalent relationships with their pasts. After Zeppelin’s demise in…

Everyone went to the same school as someone famous. In my case it’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who joined my former school about 30 years after I left. Back in the mid-1970s, the most famous old boy was another superhero, Major Pat Reid, who’d been captured by the Germans during the war and briefly imprisoned in Colditz. His bestselling memoir popularised the notorious jail and led to a TV series, an Action Man model and various other spin-offs. He was known as the only man to have escaped from the Nazis and turned it into a board game. He showed up on sports day, in July 1975, to give us a pep talk and hand out prizes to the school’s top athletes. I wasn’t among them, of course. My great days…

Roast potatoes shouldn’t be complicated. We’re talking two ingredients, plus some salt and maybe herbs if you’re feeling fancy. It’s just shoving some parboiled potatoes in a hot oven, right? Yet I can count on one hand the number of times that I’ve had a decent roast potato in a pub or restaurant. Bad ones are to be found all over the place. I don’t just mean school dinners, mass-catering, hospital-canteen potatoes here. The most carefully prepared Sunday roasts at charming establishments feature beautiful melting meat and thoughtfully cooked veg, all sitting alongside miserable roasties. Clammy. Dark brown. Soft (but not in a good way). A waste of a good potato. No one doesn’t like a roast potato; they’re practically our national dish. Done right, they’re transcendental. Glassy. Golden. Crunchy.…