Doomscrolling
In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the…
Study in Scarlett
Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has…
Diplomatic distractions
My dear friend Richard Stow is a most congenial fellow. A serious financial entrepreneur, he is also a clubman and…
The Spectator’s Notes
I remember my father telling me about Imre Nagy’s final broadcast before the Hungarian leader was taken by the Russians…
2547: Ascending order
The (unrelated) unclued lights (one of three words, four of two words, (one with an apostrophe), one pair and two…
How to create a bottleneck
I spend quite a lot of time attacking what I call ‘motorway service station’ path design. More attentive readers of…
The turf
You don’t always have to win to enjoy it. At the end of the £100,000 Paddy Power Imperial Cup at…
Dear Mary
Q. These days I am on a tight budget while many of my friends are still able to spend freely.…
Gone but not forgotten
Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses,…
Biden is right: crypto world needs regulatory control
President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one…
Her dark materials
It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark…
Free speech, Facebook and me
By the time you read this the new draft of the Online Safety Bill should be on the DCMS website.…
Diary
Skopje, North Macedonia In the West, it’s tempting to believe that revulsion at Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is…
Would you stay or would you go?
For many of us war voyeurs watching the news with a glass of sherry, admiration of the little-engine-that-could Ukrainian fighters…
Away with the fairies
Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs…
Driven into the ground
Remember ashtrays in cars? Soon cars will themselves become objects of wet-eyed nostalgic reverie. A thrilling era of propelling ourselves,…
There’s no putting Putin in a box
At the heart of the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sits an ambiguity that it is convenient, perhaps…
Bunker mentality
Phantom of the Open is a comedy-drama telling a true story that would have to be true as no one…
Black forest gateau
Kitsch is something of my stock-in-trade. And it doesn’t get more kitsch than Black Forest gateau. Pots of cream, pints…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
Will the West’s unity against Russia last?
Over recent days I have been reflecting on War and Peace. Or Special Operation and Peace as it must now…
Real life
The lodger looked at me blankly and pronounced wearily, as though intoning something he was tired of parroting, that I…
The truth about lies
The ex-Speaker John Bercow has been found to be a serial bully and serial liar. The ancients would have had…
Solution to 2544: Fives
First prize Leigh Hughes, Bootle, Merseyside Runners-up Francis Wheen, Pleshey, Essex; Robin Jolly, Selsey, Chichester, West Sussex Got something to…
