Vintage Vick
At the end of Birmingham Opera Company’s RhineGold, as the gods stood ready to enter Valhalla, Donner swung a baseball…
Alpha to Zulu
In Competition No. 3210, you were invited to provide a poem or a piece of prose containing words from the…
Kicking the habit
Work is our new religion. There are people whose primary job is writing listicles of celebrity gossip, illustrated with gifs…
The mild West
An athlete seeking sanctuary in a foreign embassy after a state–sponsored attempt to spirit her home from the Olympics; a…
Letters
Here illegally Sir: Unfortunately, Charlotte Eagar misses the point (‘The alpha migrants’, 31 July). The Channel migrants may be ‘bright…
Bridge
To be a killer bridge player, you need to be aggressive. Many of us are hampered by timidity, especially when…
Angry about everything
Is Lucy Ellmann serious? On the one hand, yes, very. The novel she published before this collection of essays was…
Low life
Although fatigued to the point of catatonia, and sitting there like a 19th-century Fang funeral mask, I am glad to…
High life
Patmos A very long time ago I wrote in these here pages that spending a summer on the Riviera or…
A fevered mind
Philip Hensher finds Robert Burton’s perception of the world and the human condition endlessly fascinating
Simone’s Olympic trial
The outstanding gymnast Simone Biles has pulled out of several Olympic events, saying: ‘I just don’t trust myself as much…
Writer’s notebook
When, three years ago, I announced my retirement from writing fiction, the only thing that surprised me was the surprise…
Don’t pick a fight with the SNP
Since the Holyrood elections in May, the campaign for Scottish independence has been noticeably quiet. But that is about to…
The Spectator’s Notes
On Monday 2 August, the BBC Today programme offered its ‘Countdown to COP26’. For the rest of the month, Amol…
The turf
At last proper racing is back. Through the long days of lockdown horses and jockeys have still given their all…
Diary
I’ve always been a Spectator reader, so I’m delighted to be writing a diary about the Olympics from Tokyo. My…
Real life
The woman pulled up in her flashy 4×4 which was meandering along the farm track in that way people have…
Looking for enchantment
Most social occasions now seem to kick off with a wasted hour or two. The time is spent discussing Covid:…
Wash-up
‘They asked me if I wanted to wash up before we even went in to dinner,’ my husband recalled with…
The AI future is rosy
In the future, men enjoying illicit private pleasures with their intelligent sexbots might be surprised to find that even women…
A boon for classicists
The great Latinist D.R. Shackleton Bailey was once said to have been pinned into a corner at a party and…
The ghost in the corner of the room
Strange, really, that the scheduled output of traditional broadcasters became known as ‘terrestrial’ television, given that TV is an etheric…
