The Spectator’s Notes
‘Tencent Wykeham’ has a ring to it. It captures how easily British universities can be bought. It is the new…
Dear Mary
Q. My husband has always worked extremely hard and now does so from home — so I go to great…
High life
Gstaad During these dark, endless periods of lockdown, let’s take a trip down memory lane to a time when we…
Titles of courtesy
I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator, 6 February) that it is a shame the Times is dropping its use…
City limits
The phrase ‘rich people’s problems’ has its uses. I once overheard a group in a Knightsbridge restaurant sympathising with a…
Barometer
Temper, temper A Zoom video of a disruptive parish council meeting in Handforth, Cheshire, went viral. It is not the…
When music was more than a click away
In Teenage Superstars, a long and slightly exhausting documentary about the Scottish indie scene of the 1980s and ’90s, there…
Facts are history
Your quiz for the week is to make the connection between the following people: fun-loving Greek hack Homer, veteran US…
Solution to 2490: Arrangement
Suggested by 30 (IKEBANA, or flower arranging), the unclued lights were all anagrams of flowers: 1A gardenia; 18 rose; 22…
The Northern Ireland protocol problem
Ursula von der Leyen now admits that she overreacted in the EU’s vaccine row with the UK. She has spoken…
Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder
The wine has been flowing in the Young household this week. The reason I’ve been celebrating is because I managed…
From bad joke to 21st-century classic
Erich Korngold was what you might call an early adopter. As a child prodigy in Habsburg Vienna, he’d astonished the…
Bridge
The Young Chelsea Bridge Club is moving — literally and figuratively. They are relocating to the Salvation Army building in…
Joining the dots
‘History,’ wrote Edward Gibbon, ‘is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.’ In…
The great carve-up
At the end of the last century, Simon Winchester bought 123 acres of wooded mountainside in the hamlet of Wassaic,…
St Bartholomew the Great
There is only one place in the world that has played host to both the Virgin Mary and Benjamin Franklin,…
Yummy mummy
Seventh Seltzer is a nice family man, working as a publisher’s reader in New York, who happens to come from…
Trigger happy
In this line of business you receive many emails from PRs ‘reaching out’ about their particular film, which I really…
Portrait of the week
Home On Sunday 7 February, as the week began, 11,465,210 people in the United Kingdom had received a first vaccination…
Cinema as car ad
It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American…
My palate and the plague
Later this week, on Spectator.co.uk, I will resolve a mystery that has featured in a lot of Zoom traffic around…
Author’s Notebook
In the middle of December, for reasons I’m coming to, I woke early in a posh hotel. I lay semi-dozing…
Lost and found
These rediscovered drawings by Hokusai point to him as the father of photography and modern animation, says Laura Gascoigne
From Downton to Dudley
The Duchess of Rutland, Emma Manners (née Watkins), grew up on a farm in the Welsh Borders before becoming proprietress…
