Letters
Running the asylum Sir: The interview with Robert Buckland must be the most depressing article I have read for a…
Portrait of the week
Home Sir Gavin Williamson resigned from the cabinet as minister without portfolio following publication of texts he had sent (annoyed…
To B or not to B
Paul Weller releasing a collection of solo B-sides is cause for mild celebration. After all, the Jam were one of…
The Battle for Britain
The post The Battle for Britain | 12 November 2022 appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join…
Tricks of the trade
Soon after Kwasi Kwarteng’s not-so-mini-Budget, I found myself in conversation with former aides to David Cameron and Boris Johnson respectively.…
The curious case of Malcolm MacArthur
Non-fiction tells you what happened, fiction affirms the kinds of things that happen. According to Aristotle, anyway. So while journalism…
Delights to behold
If you were to ask which single business concept deserves to be more widely known, I would be hard-pressed to…
What Boris should have said at Cop27
I was a little disappointed by Boris Johnson’s argument against Britain paying reparations for the damage done to developing countries…
Hide and seek
Jafar Panahi’s No Bears is, first and foremost, a wonderful film. More than this, you don’t need to know but…
We’ve lost interest in our dependencies
Let nobody say Liz Truss achieved nothing in her mayfly days at Downing Street. She gave away the vast British…
Privates on parade
During the 1964 debut of Carolee Schneemann’s ‘Meat Joy’ in Paris, a man in the audience tried to throttle the…
Books of the year II
A further selection of recent books enjoyed by our regular reviewers – and a few that have disappointed them
The spoils of war
Wine-making can have a tragic dimension, and rarely more so than with Italian Pinot Nero: that is, Pinot Noir. It…
Gross profit
Gratingly edgy soundtrack, stomach-churning gore, torture, witchcraft, sadism and an indigestible title. The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself sounds…
A nagging sense of loss
James Stourton’s civilised arguments for preserving the great architecture of the past seem coupled with hostility to anything remotely novel or inventive
Going to ground
There’s advice on flower planting from celebrated garden designers and some astonishing facts about the life contained in a handful of healthy soil
A monument to ornithology
The great artist and ornithologist who produced the magnificent Birds of America is now being shunned as a bird-slaughtering white supremacist
Wacky words and ideas
Quirky subjects also include inaccessible football grounds, the fear of blushing, Count Binface’s manifesto and pigeon cartoons from the New Yorker
A prison within a prison
Fatos Lubonja describes how he and countless others were condemned, on the flimsiest of pretexts, to languish for years in Albanian prisons
Via sacra
In 1915, Douglas Gillespie, aged 25, hoped that a tree-shaded ‘via sacra’ would one day mark the Western Front. Anthony Seldon helps to realise this a century later
