Backchat
In Competition No. 3177 you were invited to submit a well-known fictional person’s view of their author. Highlights in a…
A battle for Eton’s soul
When trying to get my head around the row that has engulfed Eton College in the past two weeks I…
Real life
Now that our social lives are a Venn diagram that only mathematicians can understand I am officially becoming a recluse.…
Roots of happiness
Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this…
Dear Mary
Q. Unlike my wife, I am tiring of Netflix. Wanting a project to occupy me during these long dark nights,…
Strange
‘Forget coronavirus,’ said my husband, ‘the word of the year is strange.’ The strange thing is he’s right. This wasn’t…
AC/DC: Power Up
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
Green will be remembered only as a nasty stain on capitalism
There really isn’t much left to be said about Sir Philip Green as his Arcadia fashion empire collapses into administration,…
Solution to 2483: In my soup
Unclued lights are anagrams of animals: PRAENOMINA (1A: Pomeranian), MARTIAN (18: tamarin), LARBOARD (21: Labrador), SHORE (28: horse), PROTEIN (42:…
The Spectator’s Notes
My inbox is crowded with messages from Old Etonians attacking Simon Henderson, the headmaster of Eton. They are furious that…
Chess improvement
The juicy prospect of improvement constantly dangles above a chess player. Those morsels of knowledge one has acquired whet the…
Goodbye to all that
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…
Bridge
Many years ago I remember Tor Helness, the great Norwegian champion, going into the semi-final of a world championship saying:…
China needs to make reparations
It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by…
Bright and beautiful
When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ —…
Can Boris win round his rebel MPs?
The beginning of the end for Theresa May was when she tried to see if she could pass her Brexit…
Low life
There are several cave houses built into the cliff. Ours is the highest and can be reached only by a…
Letters
Left vs left Sir: Your leading article (‘Comfort spending’, 28 November) makes the classic mistake about modern politics which prevents…
About Schmidt
The sounds that Franz Schmidt made while learning the trumpet were pretty much unbearable, or so the story goes. In…
Swear words
Freed from the bonds of the European Union, Britain is now in a position to sign whatever trade deal it…
Spotted dick and custard
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times,…
Diary
I’m often asked why Channel 4 recently banned an episode of my show The IT Crowd because of ‘transphobia’. I…
The great awakening
Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were…
