Bridge
What do we want? We want to play bridge. But who anticipated Covid-19 was going to close every bridge club…
Dysfunctional music by dysfunctional people
A star is born, but instead of emerging into the world beaming for the cameras, he spits and snarls and…
Low life
Avid Spectator reader Mr Brown had endured the very strictest of lockdowns for family health reasons in Tunbridge Wells. Since…
The Bard in the bedroom
Nicholas Hytner’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens in a world of puritanical austerity. The cast wear sombre black costumes and…
Hats off to Liverpool
Where were we? Oh yes, Liverpool were running away with the Premier League and a mere three months later have…
Audio onanism
In Beeb-dominated Britain, the commercial triumph of podcasting — epitomised by Spotify’s recent £100 million deals with Joe Rogan and…
Wild life
As we all know by now, the pandemic distorts time like a concertina. Life before March is a world that…
Small miracles
If I had a rouble or a euro for every reader who fulfilled their lockdown promise to devour Dostoevsky, Tolstoy…
Real Life
My friend turned up wearing a snorkelling mask, beneath which she had tied a bandana around her mouth. On her…
Ghoulish entertainment
Disaster tourism allows people to explore places in the aftermath of natural and man-made disasters. Sites of massacres and concentration…
High life
Gstaad A friend of mine who lives here wants to start a literary festival and asked me if I had…
Fair women and brave men
History is full of ‘ifs’ and the Spartan story fuller than most. If the 300 had not made their famous…
The great pretender
In the past Werner Herzog has given us a man pushing a ship up a mountain, a 16th-century conquistador going…
The censorship spiral
It’s open season on mavericks and dissenters at the moment. If you publicly challenge any of the sacred nostrums of…
Creative destruction
For three months art lovers have had nothing but screens to look at. As one New York dealer complained to…
Entrepreneurship – not Johnson’s New Deal – will lead us back to prosperity
John Maynard Keynes looks down and smiles, recalling his own perhaps too-often quoted remark that ‘when the facts change, I…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Starmer has already reshaped Labour
For the first time in 13 years, the public, when polled, think a Labour leader would make the best prime…
The chilling effect
The printed press is not a natural ally of Facebook. Silicon Valley publishers have hoovered up so much advertising that…
Rhyme and reason
‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds…
Online chess
How have you been filling these listless homebound hours we’ve been given by the government? I’ve been frittering them away…
Letters
Deterring crime Sir: Rod Liddle is right to highlight the politicisation of the police as a source of their inadequacies,…
