SPIRITED THINKING SINCE 1888
Harry Mount

Review: The Blue Guide to Rome
June 06, 2020
“Gripping” and “delicious”: Harry Mount reviews The Blue Guide’s latest offerings for Chapter House. Ever since 1918, Blue Guides have been the best guides to European cities. No other guide has the sheer quantity of facts. For people who want to know why a building is where it is, who built it, when and in what style,
A new slant on timeless tales
September 02, 2021
Harry Mount reviews Charlotte Higgins's new book, 'Greek Myths: A New Retelling' for the September '21 issue of the Catholic Herald
A new slant on timeless tales
August 27, 2021
Greek Myths: A New Retelling Charlotte Higgins Jonathan Cape, £20, 336 pages ________ In Ancient Greek, mythos simply meant a traditional story – and, to modern Greeks, a Mythos means the best beer in the country. The Greek myths, then, are really the best stories ever told – and some of the earliest. As Virginia
Christianity and all that
June 01, 2021
The Treasures of English Churches: Witnesses to the History of a Nation, by Matthew Byrne Shire Publications, £20, 160 pages   And Did Those Feet: The Story and Character of the English Church AD 200-2020, by Patrick Whitworth  Sacristy Press, £40, 662 pages ________ The Archbishop of Canterbury and every single Anglican vicar and Catholic
A tour of buildings and monuments in Mayfair and St James’s
March 01, 2021
Hidden gems: An intriguing guide to a neglected corner of London
The wild, baroque strain in Bernini’s soul
September 24, 2020
An Elephant in Rome: Bernini, The Pope and The Making of the Eternal City By Loyd Grossman Pallas Athene, £19.99 Loyd Grossman, presenter of Through the Keyhole and Master-Chef, writing about Bernini, the 17th-century baroque magician who could turn stone into flesh? Surely that’s like listening to Simon Cowell on Tiepolo? Well, no. Dr Grossman,
The internet has taken away the joy of boredom
July 02, 2020
Bored, bored, bored … That’s been my coronavirus experience. Luckily, I’ve avoided the plague. But I’ve been thrown on my own inner resources – and found them woefully inadequate. I’ve tiled the tiny floor of my boiler cupboard – badly. I’ve framed two pictures – badly – and hung them in my flat. I’ve read
Diary: The reactionary hacks who turn to the Church
March 12, 2020
Before the journalist and former Private Eye editor Christopher Booker died last year, aged 81, he’d just finished a book, Groupthink: A Study in Self-Delusion, published this week.  Under that catch-all heading of Groupthink, Booker nimbly skewers the malaise of the modern age: how an “in-group” polices society with its new form of puritanism, coming down hard on
London’s nearly perfect pub
January 16, 2020
Last Wednesday, at 9pm, I had a splendid choice of murder programmes to watch. There was White House Farm, about the 1985 Jeremy Bamber murders (I’m convinced he did it) on ITV. There was a new series of Silent Witness on BBC One. And, on BBC Two, there was The Disappearance of Margaret Fleming, about
The long twilight of the Roman gods
January 02, 2020
How to Think about God By Marcus Tullius Cicero, translated by Philip Freeman Princeton, 151pp, £13.99/$16.95 This handy little book could just have well been called “How to Think about God – just before Jesus Turned Up”. It is a translation (with Latin on the lefthand page, as in a Loeb) of Cicero’s works On
The morality of dressing well
December 19, 2019
What should you wear at Christmas parties? And how should you look presentable without looking vain? I stumbled upon the answer at the inaugural Idler of the Year Awards, recently held by the Idler magazine in Pushkin House, a charming, 18th-century building in Bloomsbury. The Idler celebrates not so much lethargy as the need to
The sweet, neglected pastures of Latin
November 21, 2019
Long Live Latin by Nicola Gardini, Profile, 256pp, £14.99/$26 Is Latin still alive? Yes, there are some intellectuals like Benedict XVI who can speak Latin. He gave his resignation statement in Latin in 2013 – mirabile dictu! The Vatican now has a marvellous news programme in Latin, too. But these are some of the last
The best drink I’ve had all year is a Stella
November 14, 2019
A new all-women’s club, AllBright, is doing fantastically well in its branches in Mayfair and Fitzrovia. So well, in fact, that it’s opened a branch in Los Angeles and is opening two more in New York and Washington, DC. Why do people join clubs? I speak as a member of the Beefsteak Club and the
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