US EDITION OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST MAGAZINE

January issue

The heterodox cabinet

Read Latest Issue Read it now. >>

The longevity of A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

Books

The longevity of A Christmas Carol

Dickens wrote it in six weeks, amid explosions of laughter and tears at his desk

Joshua Young

The limits of AI assistants

How, for instance, can small daily rituals be programmed?

Slavoj Žižek

Peter Ackroyd’s tour of English religious history

There isn’t much in The English Soul that you could not get from clicking in and out of the relevant Wikipedia entries on Wesley or the Diggers

A.N. Wilson

P.G. Wodehouse’s literary canon

His work’s modernity, making such innovative use of the main literary traditions of the West, would have been unimaginable in the nineteenth century

Charles Moore

Books

The ancient origins of the Christmas ghost story

It cathartically exorcises our fear of the spirits of the outer darkness

Francis Young

Book Review
September 18, 2023
How much of Dickens’s London is fiction?
Is it a place, or a state of mind, or a bit of both?
A.N. Wilson
Television
April 4, 2023
The new foul-mouthed Great Expectations is as bad as you’d expect
Amid the spanking and mud and tedium, its impact is all but lost
Alexander Larman
Book Review
February 22, 2023
1845: the year that changed Britain
The Year That Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845 by Michael Wheeler reviewed
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Book Review
October 15, 2022
Reworking Dickens
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver reviewed
Michael Arditti
Books
December 27, 2021
How chilling ghost stories became a Christmas tradition
Haunted doll houses are nowadays two-a-penny, but I can think of only one haunted Nativity set
Caroline Moore
Language
September 16, 2021
The link between spick and span, spanking and spoon
Whatever spick and span reminds us of, it is as an idiom with a cheery meaning of its own
Dot Wordsworth
Food
August 6, 2021
Bath buns: just the right amount of sweetness
The Bath bun has been enjoyed in the English city of Bath for over 300 years
Olivia Potts
Faith
December 25, 2020
Christmas anxieties are back
Christians worried about commercialism have decades-old company
Tom Holland
Books
June 18, 2020
A choice of classic crime fiction
Andrew Taylor revisits Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and Patricia Highsmith among other favorite authors
Andrew Taylor
Film
May 15, 2020
The similarity between Charles Dickens and Armando Iannucci
The director’s new work, The Personal History of David Copperfield, is certainly brave
Will Lloyd

Subscribe today