Letters
Treading the boards Sir: As a teacher, I was sorry Lloyd Evans did not include school productions in his excellent…
Skateboarding
I was 12 when I got into skateboarding: the same age as Sky Brown, the youngest member of Team GB’s…
Portrait of the week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that if a review of coronavirus restrictions on 12 July allowed, then on…
Sense and sensibility
Zoe Dubno on the rise of the ‘sensitivity reader’, a seductively cheap way for publishers to cancel-proof their books
The best thing on TV ever
I’ve been trying to avoid the house TV room as much as possible recently because it tends to be occupied…
Why shouldn’t the City pick an Irish Lord Mayor?
The Financial Times carried a curious story at the weekend about ‘the secretive process to elect the Lord Mayor of…
Ritz assessment
The Ritz is still here, and still gaudy. No grand hotel in London feels quite so complete, if pink; as…
One of life’s irregulars
Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…
Grand designs
Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…
Bridge
Top bridge players have a spooky ability to recall thousands of hands, often from many years back. With so many…
Bach to basics
Bach & Sons opens with the great composer tinkling away on a harpsichord while a toddler screeches his head off…
Opening time
A charge repeatedly made against Boris Johnson over the past 16 months is that he has ‘ignored scientific advice’. But…
Westminster Notebook
The acting one sees upon the stage doesn’t show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how…
Bring me sunshine
Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency —…
The Spectator’s Notes
In deciding whether or not to wear a mask after 19 July, I am sure Boris Johnson is right that…
Me, myself and I
I thought that this week I would share with you a bunch of words and phrases which are currently overused…
Barometer
Mask crusader Who first wore a medical face mask? — The beaked outfits worn by plague doctors aside, the first…
The bogus business of stigma-busting
Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so…
The lure of yellow pages
For almost as long as there have been books, there have been books about books — writers just love to…
Diary
I’ve been amazed by the response to my decision to leave my band, Mumford & Sons. The article in which…
Diana’s strange monument
The recently unveiled funerary monument of Princess Diana prompts comparison with Greek and Roman archetypes. To many, Diana was a…
The new youngest grandmaster
Abhimanyu Mishra became the world’s youngest grandmaster last month, at 12 years and 4 months old. The boy from New…
2514: Welcome back
Unclued lights (one of two words, the others paired) are of a kind. Across 7Lace branches left in fruit tree (6)…
The confusing case of Oli London
Not everyone will have heard of Oli London, a British social media influencer who made news for two reasons last…
Solution to 2511: Changing places
The unclued lights form pairs of anagrams, one word in each pair being a place-name: 1A/6A, 1D/21, 6D/13, 11/38, 19/30…
