Emperor Ferguson has no clothes
I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial…
Dear Mary
Q To your correspondent with a guest whose table manners offend (2 May), you suggest screening him off with a…
Letters
The case for small homes Sir: Your editorial rightly highlights what must be one of the government’s priorities once the…
Antique dildos
Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if…
The politics of bookshelves
I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very…
Versailles lockdown
A few years ago I interviewed an eminent baroque conductor. Prickly and professorial, tired after a day of rehearsals, he…
Withdrawal symptoms
A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…
The Spectator’s notes
Mathias Döpfner is that still rare thing — an outspoken German. I have known him slightly for many years and…
Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters
Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…
Many happy returns
Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying…
Solution to 2453: All Right?
Unclued lights were characters in the musical Oklahoma!, 2/20, 4A, 10, 22, 24, 30, 35/15D. They are AUNT ELLER, WILL…
Barometer
Admitting defeat 8 May is celebrated as VE Day, but it is also a date which marks a significant English…
The great and the not so good
Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…
Portrait of the Week
Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was…
Drawing a blank
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
Real life
The rain showers had a strange and wondrous effect. All the cyclists, joggers and dog walkers that were coming from…
Life on a plate
In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…
Cracking the code
There’s no such thing as ‘the science’ – but facts are emerging from the Covid fog
The great juggling act
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
Lullabies and lockdown
I laughed when my Spanish midwife mentioned in passing that in Latin American countries they have a custom for new…
