Life
Dog people are the worst
The couple who were on a climate crisis camping trip in Ballydehob messaged me in a desperate state. ‘We’re cold…
My beef with Bruce Anderson
My beef with the columnist Bruce Anderson began, as beefs do, at the Spectator summer party. Not this year’s –…
I’ve fallen in love with crème caramel
If you’ve stuck out my cookery writing for long enough, you’ll know that I am a bit of a Labrador…
Aussie life
In London, where I am writing this, three topics dominate pub conversation; the demise of Sir Keir Starmer, the historically…
Language
Sometimes I worry about what is happening to higher education – not just here, but around the English-speaking world. My…
‘A contradiction in terms’: Zylia reviewed
Can there be, in Britain, such a thing as a destination Greek taverna? There are some cases where proximity is…
After 26 years, it’s farewell to Wild Life
Kenya In the year 2001 Toby Young asked me to help him boost The Spectator’s new online edition by writing…
Make men’s shorts socially acceptable
For a country which loves to talk about the weather, we do not do it very well. They order these…
Spectator Competition: Semiquincentennial
Comp. 3456 invited you to mark 250 years since the birth of the United States with a poem. There were…
Labour’s mad media protectionism
Just when you think this government cannot get any madder, it publishes a truly mental green paper. Called ‘Watch this…
Andy Burnham is the Disraeli of the North
As seen in the New Statesman (Cont. from pages 1-13)… as V.S. Naipaul once remarked in The Road to Wigan…
Who’s the real King of the North?
Andy Burnham must feel the burden of the sobriquet with which he has been saddled: King of the North. It…
Blood, sweat and tears on the road to Nice
Provence Straight from a weekend of helping a friend with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, I drove to Nice airport to…
Who can I trust with my dog when I go on holiday?
Two summers ago, when Dennis was a puppy, I went to the vet to get the 793 bits of paper…
Dear Mary: how can I stop someone from treating a waiter badly?
Q. A gang of us have rented a house in Portugal. We have all been friends since school, but one…
The day the bishop hit me in the face
The bishop hit us in the face. That was the best thing about confirmation. When I was 12, along with…
Aussie life
Measuring tobacco consumption is dirty work, but somebody has to do it. The antiseptic image of the government statistician has…
Language
The word of the moment is undoubtedly ‘monocultural’. In her take-no-prisoners speech at the National Press Club Pauline Hanson said…
To survive the heatwave, drink beer
Heat and dust, plus nonsense. If the high temperatures had arrived earlier, the England cricket authorities could claim that their…
