Deep Purple: Whoosh!
Grade: B+ Less deep purple than a pleasant mauve. Ageing headbangers will note a lack of the freneticism that distinguished…
I’m helping lockdown sceptics find love
I started a dating site last Sunday. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but I’ve become a kind of…
Barometer
Some like it hot Are heatwaves becoming a devalued currency? Last year the Met Office defined a heatwave as three…
Test of character
You are, shall we say, a famous commentator, one of a tiny elite in the British media. You are paid…
Great Dane
Snaps + Rye is a Nordic-themed restaurant and delicatessen on the Golborne Road, at the shabby and thrilling edges of…
Diary
I have known Ghislaine Maxwell for more than 40 years, since she was a student at Balliol. I always liked…
‘Theatre is back!’
So the madness continues. Planes full of passengers are going everywhere. Theatres full of ghosts are going bust. My first…
He shall not grow old
Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was…
Rival magicians
Mordew ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids, as Elton John nearly sang. If they escape the ravages…
The knights’ tale
One of the strange effects that modernist, progressive society has had on what the French Annales school would refer to…
A colourful pot-pourri
For more than 100 years Paris has been as much a symbol and a myth as a geographical reality. The…
The dear departed
I can think of few novels as bleak or dispiriting as Yiyun Li’s 2009 debut, The Vagrants. Set in a…
The Spectator’s notes
Chris Packham is widely seen as the most extreme of well-known animal rights activists. His obsessions against hunting and shooting…
Scholar and wandering poet
Bruce Wannell was by some way one of the most charismatic travellers I have ever met. Despite his almost complete…
There’s nothing ‘wild’ about elopement
I didn’t realise how attached I was to the traditional British wedding — the whole messy, pricey, drunken business —…
The inflated currency of racism
Hearing that Dawn Butler MP had been pulled over by the Metropolitan police, I briefly hoped the taxpayer might get…
Solution to 2467: Girl Talk
The unclued lights, 3/34, 12/31, 26/1A/33, 35/9, 39 and 18 PEAKE (an anagram of the red highlighted letters), are six…
Kamala chameleon
Kamala Harris, the new Democratic vice-presidential nominee, certainly looks the part. Barack Obama once called her ‘the best-looking attorney general…
