Feat of clay
No wonder Josiah Wedgwood, the 18th-century master potter, was a darling of the Victorians. From W.E. Gladstone to Samuel Smiles…
High life
Gstaad When Gerald Murphy and Cole Porter discovered the French Riviera as a summer resort during the early 1920s, the…
Do go changing
I have been on holiday for two weeks. Well, not quite. You see, a bloke I once met told me…
Wild life
Malindi, Kenya Beneath the Indian Ocean’s surface, I wondered if the pandemic had turned out to be a good thing…
Barometer
Birth of the Paralympics While Athens can claim to be the home city of the Olympic Games, the Paralympics can…
I blame Tony Blair
The Americans may have pulled out, but luckily the Afghans have the world’s vibrant community of witches intervening to save…
War and peace
‘No one is stupid enough to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers; in war, fathers bury…
The Spectator’s Notes
This week, the media pressure was on the British government to extend the deadline for the evacuations from Kabul airport.…
The cruel seafood
It was a hot late evening on the Greek island of Tinos, and we were sitting at a quayside restaurant…
The fiasco of the century
There was certainly no shortage of excellent advice about war in Afghanistan offered to many American leaders by many people over many years, says Justin Marozzi
A ridge too far?
Twenty-five years ago, my cousin Jock, a Scottish priest, rang in shock. Two priest friends, David and Norman, had been…
Anything goes
When the internationally acclaimed abstract painter John Hoyland died in 2011 at the age of 76, a large chunk of…
Spirit of place
In a 1923 book called Echo de Paris, the writer Laurence Houseman attempted to conjure up in a very slim,…
Souls for sale
Ursula Le Guin once described speculative fiction as ‘a great heavy sack of stuff, a carrier bag full of wimps…
Twin rebels
‘Newly discovered novel’ can be a discouraging phrase. Sure, some writers leave works of extraordinary calibre lurking among their effects…
A city in the grip of Terror
Colin Jones’s hour-by-hour reconstruction of the fall of Maximilien Robespierre, the French revolutionary most associated with the Terror, is inspired…
Nostalgia for the Ottomans
One of the most depressing vignettes in Michael Vatikiotis’s agreeably meandering account of his cosmopolitan family’s experiences in the Near…
Prophet of disenchantment
Astonishing where an idea can lead you. You start with something that 800 years hence will sound like it’s being…
Low life
At Gatwick airport, after an hour and 15 minutes in a snaking queue system apparently purposely designed to infect as…
Real life
The letter arrived in a hand-addressed envelope, inside of which was a handwritten note. After everything we have been through,…
Bridge
So, face-to-face bridge is slowly returning, with EBU’s Summer Meeting in Eastbourne being one of the first to take place.…
