Letters
The word of God Sir: Douglas Murray complains that the C of E has embraced the ‘new religion’ of anti-racism…
Mead
The last time I drank mead was 7 April 1978. It was my 18th birthday and —unforgettably — it was…
The double-decker in the room
‘If anybody can write an interesting column about buses, Matthew,’ the then comment editor on the Times told me decades…
The Spectator’s Notes
As the former editor of a Sunday newspaper, I know their front pages can be rather confected. There is sometimes…
Making the facts fit the narrative
Distracted by vaccine warfare, for once the British haven’t leapt onto America’s latest bandwagon of fake self-excoriation. Following last week’s…
The chips are down for a new era of fractured trade
Just as the auto industry embraces the electric future I wrote about last month, it hits a new crisis: a…
It’s a dog eat dog world
I was walking with our one-year-old cavapoochon on the way back from the baker’s in Acton on Sunday morning when…
Dear Mary
Q. A dear friend of long-standing has a propensity to make friends of our friends — people she has first…
Eight reasons to leave the UK
We commemorated one year of lockdown by sacrificing a goat to the Highly Revered Virus Deity on a hastily assembled…
Sturgeon fights on – but time is against her
A year ago this week Alex Salmond was acquitted on all 13 charges in his sexual assault trial. In normal…
Low life
Applying for a French bank account is like trying for a permit to open a Christian bookshop in North Korea.…
Celebrity gangster
Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was about as meta-gangsterish as a real life gangster could get. Born in the slums of Manhattan’s…
One who got away
Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the…
The beauty of the ampersand
This is such a great idea: a book with one short essay per punctuation mark or typographical symbol. Of course,…
Real life
The rope riders came down the driveway slowly, their horses veering this way and that, side to side, forwards a…
Blasts from the past
One of the unforeseen consequences of the rise of streaming was a change in the very structure of the pop…
Mercurio rising
When a drama begins with news of a ‘Chis handler’ receiving ‘intel graded A1 on the matrix’ that causes a…
Vibrant
‘Think yourself lucky,’ said my husband when I told him about poor John Stuart Mill’s mother, who had nine children…
