Ian Thomson has contributed reviews, interviews and articles to the Spectator since 1987. The magazine was founded in 1828. The literary pages represent a broad church of opinions.
Reviews and Articles
30 April 2016
Filming the Final Solution
Article on Laszlo Nemes’s film Son of Saul
26 March 2016
Diced heart and a full-bodied red
Review of Valerio Varesi’s A Woman Much Missed
14 May 2016
Rewriting holy write
Review of Harry Freedman’s The Murderous History of Bible Translations
16 July 2016
The Day Before Happiness Jumps on the Neapolitan Bandwagon
Review of Erri De Luca’s novel
12 June 2015
Beautiful, bedevilled island
12 March 2015
Wild Man of the Woods
Review of Nina Lyon’s Uprooted: On the Trail of the Green Man
3 October 2015
Article
10 October 2105
Modernity, Whiskey and Cats: the J.G.Ballard I knew
Article
21 November 2015
Article
21 November 2015
A martyred city
Review of Frederick Taylor’s Coventry: Thursday 14 November 1940
12 December 2015
Here’s to Bill
Review of A.A.Gill’s Pour Me: A Life
12 December 2015
How a book on Einsteinian relativity became a Christmas hit
Review of Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
11 April 2015
How Fellini made his modernist masterpiece
Otto e mezzo returns to British screens
12 September 2015
Review of Rob Chapman’s history of LSD and its cultural ramifications
4 April 2015
My Close Encounter with Revenue Protection
21 March 2015
Life in the LA ghetto was nasty, brutish and short
Review of Jill Leovy’s non-fiction Ghettoside
14 March 2015
Anders Brievik: lonely computer-gamer on a killing spree
10 January 2015
What unites Churchill, Dali and T.S. Eliot? They all worshipped the Marx Brothers
On the eve of a BFI season of Marx Bros films, Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers…
29 November 2014
Bob Marley: from reggae icon to Marlboro Man of marijuana
A kind of political correctness dictates that one should not be too hard on Bob Marley, who died of cancer in 1981 aged 36. His loping, mid-tempo reggae sounds slightly…
29 November 2014
Death wears bling: the glory of London’s Caribbean funerals
How Great Thou Art: Fifty Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London by Charlie Phillips
Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic white Doric columns and gold-encrusted ‘caskets’ are like a poor…
Wave goodbye to the weight-gaining, drunk-driving Inspector Wallander
11 October 2014
An Event in Autumn Henning Mankell
Some years ago I met the Swedish crime writer Henning Mankell at the Savoy Hotel in London, where he was staying. A waitress came up to our table. ‘I think,…
The real Dad’s Army was no joke
30 August 2014
Operation Sealion Leo McKinstry
Dad’s Army, the sitcom to end all sitcoms, portrayed the Home Guard as often doddery veterans. In one episode, Private Godfrey’s genteel sisters are seen to prepare their Regency cottage… Read more
Only tourists think of the Caribbean as a ‘paradise’
28 June 2014
Empire’s Crossroads: A History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day Carrie Gibson
A couple of years ago in Jamaica, I met Errol Flynn’s former wife, the screen actress Patrice Wymore. Reportedly a difficult and withdrawn woman, her life in the Caribbean (apart… Read more
The punk who inspired a generation of British woman to pick up a guitar
21 June 2014
Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys Viv Albertine
Viv Albertine is deservedly famous as the guitarist of the tumultuous, all-female English punk band The Slits. Their debut album, Cut, released in 1979, combined jangly Captain Beefheart-style guitarwork with… Read more
Narcotically-induced mischief in an urban wasteland
7 June 2014
Music Night at the Apollo: A Memoir of Drifting Lilian Pizzichini
Fifteen minutes by rail from Paddington, Southall is a ‘Little India’ in the borough of Ealing. An ornate Hindu temple there, the Shree Ram, is set back from the beep… Read more
Exclamation marks, no; aertex shirts, yes!
10 May 2014
A Curious Career Lynn Barber
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Jonathan Meades
Jonathan Meades, the architectural, food and cultural commentator, appears on television in a pair of retro shades and a trademark Blues Brother suit. He looks like a poseur, and indeed… Read more
Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’
3 May 2014
Georgie & Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and his Wife: The Untold Story Norman Thomas di Giovanni
When Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986, at the age of 87, he left behind 100-odd slender fictions and as many poems, but no novels. Compared with the blockbusting authors… Read more
Gay Paree: food, feuds and phalluses – I mean, fallacies
15 March 2014
Inside a Pearl Edmund White
In his preface to The Joy of Gay Sex (revised and expanded third edition), Edmund White praises the ‘kinkier’ aspects of homo-erotic life. Practical advice is given on frottage, spanking,… Read more
1 February 2014
The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien Neil Murphy and Keith Hopper (eds)
On his deathbed in Dublin in the spring of 1966, Flann O’Brien must have been squiffy from tots of Paddy. A bottle of the amber distillate was smuggled in to…Read more
‘She’s the most important Jewish writer since Kafka!’
11 January 2014
Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector Benjamin Moser
The Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector was a riddlesome and strange personality. Strikingly beautiful, with catlike green eyes, she died in Rio de Janeiro in 1977 at the age of only… Read more
The many attempts to assassinate Trotsky
4 January 2014
The Man Who Loved Dogs Leonardo Padura, translated by Anna Kushner
Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered… Read more
