Double act
Well, this a bit awkward. A fortnight ago, in my last TV column, I confidently asserted that, despite the involvement…
Real life
‘Have you had your jab, Margery?’ said one Surrey lady to another in the queue for take-away coffee at the…
How I learned to love audio books
According to a charity called Fight For Sight, 38 per cent of people who’ve been using screens more during lockdown…
Low life
Around the time that poor M. Macron was casting televised aspersions on the AstraZeneca jab, I was offered one by…
Wild life
Laikipia In one of Kenya farmer Karen Blixen’s short stories, a character says: ‘I know of a cure for everything:…
‘His paintings are perfectly meant for our times’
Musa Mayer talks to Hermione Eyre about her father Philip Guston’s cancellation and her fear that he will for ever be known as the artist who painted the Ku Klux Klan
2497: Scramble
Six unclued lights (three of two words) are of a kind, associated with the 16’s 11s, and overseen by 28.…
Spacs and the City: if London won’t, Amsterdam will
This column generally takes a sceptical view of financial novelties and gimmicks. So my antennae have twitched in recent days…
Armenian champions
In the 21st century, which country has won more international chess Olympiads than any other? Russia? USA? China? None of…
The Spectator’s Notes
I have been slow in the uptake. When I saw the Duchess of Sussex complain in her interview clips about…
Dinners through the dynasties
A truth that ought to be universally acknowledged is that Chinese food, while much loved, is underappreciated. China certainly has…
To the moon – and back
I have just applied to fly around the moon. My chances of being selected are slim, but is it impossible?…
Wind, sea and sky
Bird migration was once one of those unassailable mysteries that had baffled humankind since Aristotle. A strange hypothesis, genuinely advanced…
There’s no ‘my’ in truth
Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about…
Diary
Safe spaces, diversity quotas, gender-neutral pronouns, culturally relative facts, heteronormative hegemony. Are my right-on credentials right on enough? Am I…
The shifting sands of Scotland
Every politician likes to say that they don’t pay attention to opinion polls. In my experience, this is almost universally…
Touching distance
Since the start of this year, cases of Covid-19 have been in decline. Hospital admissions have fallen 80 per cent…
Letter from Japan
Tokyo This week was the tenth anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in…
Alive and kicking
Rachmaninov’s First Symphony begins with a snarl, and gets angrier. A menacing skirl from the woodwinds, a triple-fortissimo blast from…
Twitter, but with actual screaming
For my 13th birthday in 1995 I requested — and got — my own ‘line’. This meant that I could…
High life
Gstaad I was very sad to read of Rupert Hambro’s death. I didn’t know him well, but first met him…
