The Critics | The Spectator

Friday

August 7, 2026

Why Marilyn Monroe is still as big a celebrity as ever

Marilyn Monroe would have celebrated her 100th birthday this year. My new biography of her begins with this story: she’s walking with a friend down Park Avenue dressed in a raincoat and sunglasses and without make-up. As the crowds stream past her, nobody gives her a second glance. Then she turns to her friend and asks, “Do you want to see me be her?” Without changing her hair or dress, the transformation begins and, after making some kind of inner psychological adjustment, she morphs from an ordinary woman into Marilyn Monroe, superstar. As her friend, the actress Susan Strasberg, recalled: “There she was – not the simple girl I’d been strolling with, but ‘Marilyn Monroe,’ resplendent, ready for her public. Now heads turned. People crowded around her.

D.J. Taylor

Shiva Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere deserves its reissue

The Jonestown massacre, in which more than 900 people were killed and a US congressman was shot dead on a Guyanese airstrip, has been written about in dozens of books. Shiva Naipaul met some of those aspiring Jonestown authors loafing on a Georgetown hotel terrace. “Sex. Race. Suicide. Murder. Corruption. A hot Third World country. That’s a classic mix,” one said to him. There have been both forensic and lurid accounts of the Jonestown apocalypse, in which crowds of American expats were forcibly dosed with cyanide-laced Flavor Aid, but nothing comes closer to its dark, post-colonial heart than Journey to Nowhere. The book was first published in 1981, three years after the massacre, but fell out of publication.

Thursday

August 6, 2026

Alex Diggins

What’s the point of UNESCO?

The FIM-92 Stinger missile is not a subtle weapon. An antiaircraft rocket, capable of launching a high-explosive “fire and forget” laser-guided warhead at targets up to five kilometers away, it can be carried and operated by a single man. During the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA provided hundreds of Stingers to the Mujahideen, and they proved terrifyingly lethal, downing scores of helicopter gunships and killing thousands of Soviet troops. But at times they’ve been as effective against other, more unusual targets. In 2001, during the first Taliban administration of Afghanistan, the group’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, ordered the destruction of the monumental Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley, a historic Silk Road site deep within the Hindu Kush.

Nicholas Shakespeare

‘A selfish, ignoble person’ – the dark side of the Nobel prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa

In October 2010, when Gabriel García Márquez, by then suffering from dementia, was told that his former friend and rival had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he inquired: “Who is Mario Vargas Llosa?” This tottering, always compulsive biography of the writer who died last year, which has taken 15 years to write (“I completely miscalculated its complications”) is Gerald Martin’s valiant answer. “Is there a life quite like this one anywhere in the western world in the second half of the 20th century?” In Martin’s breathless judgment, “this literary adventurer, politician, diplomat and warrior all rolled into one” was a single-minded workhorse whose sheer intensity, quality and variety of life was “almost literally incredible.

Wednesday

August 5, 2026

Graeme Thomson

Is Music, Fashion, Film really the best Charli xcx can do?

Of the three creative pursuits that give Charli xcx’s eighth album its title, the English pop star seems least interested in the first. She admits as much on “Camera,” the best song on Music, Fashion, Film, which makes clear her obsession with acting and a desire to pursue it more fully. “Do I want to make music?” she asks herself. “Am I being fucking stupid if I try to be a girl on the screen and I’m turning 34?” Even without this clue – which, like much of the album, is presented via the singer throwing out rhetorical spiel more or less unexpurgated – it is no great stretch to surmise that the pursuit of making music is struggling to fully hold her attention.

Tuesday

August 4, 2026

Geoffrey Cain

China understands The Odyssey better than we do

China will inherit Homer, and not because the Communist party has decided to take him. The evidence arrived last week in Beijing, where a doctoral candidate in political theory named Yiyang Zhuge sat down with Christopher Nolan to talk about The Odyssey. She reads Greek and has translated Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese. She learned her Greek in the United States. Zhuge told Nolan that the concept of atonement does not exist in Greek culture, in the Greek language, or in Homer’s Odyssey. It is in the film. Then she asked him: “Did you Christianize the Odyssey?” Nolan said he had focused on xenia, the ancient obligation between host and guest. As for atonement, he said it was “what we bring as viewers to the story,” and that he had not intended to Christianize the poem.

Saturday

August 1, 2026

Peter Wood

What the Odyssey means to America

In 1899 Jack London, beginning his career as a writer, sold a story to Atlantic Monthly for $120. Drawing on his experiences during the Klondike gold rush and on the Yukon River, it was a tale of an Aleutian native wandering the Arctic for years on end in search of his wife, who had been stolen by a powerful Nordic sea captain. London titled his saga, “An Odyssey of the North.

Saturday

July 25, 2026

Alexander Larman

The greatness of Sam Neill

The recent death of the actor Sam Neill, at the age of 78, was greeted with a mixture of surprise, sorrow and, in many quarters, unexpected grief. It is likely that Neill would have regarded the lavish tributes paid to him by actors, filmmakers and politicians with a mixture of embarrassment and quiet pride, because although he was a brilliantly versatile actor who managed to make a deep impression in virtually every role that he undertook over his five-decade-long career, he was also someone instinctively uncomfortable with the limelight.

Friday

July 24, 2026

Ian Sansom

The appeal of asymmetry: Contrapposto, by Dave Eggers, reviewed

There are novelists who seem to spend their entire careers either apologizing for being themselves or trying to become someone else entirely. And then there’s Dave Eggers, who has spent much of the last quarter century trying – and, it has to be said, as far as one can tell, very happily succeeding – to become Dave Eggers. Ever since A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius appeared in 2000, fulfilling almost entirely the audacious promise of its title, Eggers has occupied that peculiarly American position of being not simply Yet Another Novelist, but the Guy, the Man, the yardstick by which all others might be judged and found wanting. He’s a publisher, campaigner, literacy activist, editor, artist, children’s author, philanthropist and impresario.

Rupert Christiansen

Three cheers for Britain’s most unabashedly elitist school

As we ponder the ups and downs of the UK’s sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting their unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

Jonathan Sumption

Christian soldiers in retreat – the disastrous Fifth Crusade

The Fifth Crusade, which was fought between 1217 and 1221, marked a new direction for the crusading movement of the Middle Ages. Instead of invading Palestine, as the first three crusades had done, and the Fourth Crusade might have done, the crusaders decided to attack Egypt. That was not the original idea. The formidable Pope Innocent III, who launched the Fifth Crusade, had envisaged a repeat of the old strategy of marching on Jerusalem from the sea. The invasion of Egypt was decided on the initial wave of forces after they had reached the Levant. There was a sort of logic behind the decision. The crusading kingdom of Jerusalem had been destroyed in 1187, when its army had suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Saladin at the Horns of Hattin above the Sea of Galilee.

Carson Becker

Why do political elites insist on posing as outsiders?

The American political elite have developed a peculiar habit of styling themselves as outsiders. The closer they stand to power, the less likely they are to claim it as their own. In fact, power always seems to be in the hands of someone else, someone located just out of sight. So where exactly does it reside in this late-stage republic? Nobody seems quite certain. Two new political memoirs, one seeking to clarify the past, the other aimed implicitly toward the future, share this bewilderment. Surprisingly, they also share a good deal else. There is a common obsession with European heritage, Jill Biden through her Italian roots, and J.D. Vance through his love of Great Britain and his adopted Roman Catholicism.