Women’s pay could bankrupt the BBC
I hope you are enjoying the BBC drama series Hard Sun. It is described as pre-apocalyptic science fiction, set in…
How the Rat sniffed out £15,000 down the back of my virtual sofa
It must be about 25 years since the Rat first made an appearance in The Spectator. He started out as…
Outsourcing is a good thing, regardless of the Carillion crash
Carillion is a disaster on all fronts, but my sympathies go first to the fallen contracting giant’s sub–contractors. Upwards of…
Revealed – the truth about plastic
Has an albatross ever wielded so much influence? The bewildered chick who regurgitated a plastic bag in front of Sir…
What do proper communists really think of Corbyn?
Last year, more than 15,000 communists gathered in the Russian seaside town of Sochi for a week-long commemoration of the…
Amazing grace
Last week, Peregbakumo Oyawerikumo, aka ‘The Master’, was finally caught and shot by the Nigerian army. Oyawerikumo and his Egbesu…
Real men bathe together
With my friend Maurice, I have long frequented the Ironmonger Row baths behind Moorfields Eye Hospital. As married men, we…
The curious star appeal of Jordan Peterson
Last Sunday night a capacity crowd of mainly young people packed into the Emmanuel Centre in London. Those who couldn’t…
Parole is unfair and unworkable. Let’s abolish it
The furore over the parole granted to John Worboys, the rapist taxi driver, misses the point entirely — that the…
Why the sleepy old CoE is just a greedy, moneygrubbing property tycoon
Holy smoke! The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon. This month, it emerged that since…
Padel power! But will this crazy new sport ever be a hit?
When we arrived, we discovered that our villa had a padel court. Few of us had seen one before and…
Culinary cold war at the White House
‘Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.’ The best known adage in food literature,…
Leeches, bats and toxic sap in Borneo’s Eden
Eton turns out prime ministers of various stripes and patches, but it also forges fine explorers. It seems to prepare…
An 80th birthday party causes no end of trouble in Barney Norris’s latest novel
‘People live in the space between the realities of their lives and the hopes they have for them,’ muses the…
Ethnic cleansing and the horrors of Buczacz
I thought I knew the history of the years 1914 to 1945: the first world war and the terrible casualties…
Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation close up
There are few more seductive figures for biographers than Mary Shelley. The daughter of the radical philosopher and novelist William…
Getting women on board: the history of the WRNS
This book is a thoroughly researched account of the parts played by women in the service of the Royal Navy…
Jenny Erpenbeck finds a novel way to tackle the migrant problem
The title of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go Went Gone, and the autumnal tone of its beginning — a classics professor retires,…
The sex lives of conductors
I once knew a great conductor who claimed that he never boarded a plane to a new orchestra without a…
Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive
Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250…
Nothing about Radio 4’s Across the Red Line suggested it would be as riveting as it was
On paper and on air, there’s nothing to suggest that the Radio 4 series Across the Red Line will have…
Another American playwright felled by her own trophy collection: Belleville reviewed
A pattern emerges. A hot American playwright, dripping with prestigious awards, is honoured in London with a transfer of their…
Is Britannia really in the Game of Thrones’s league?
It’s a terrible thing for a TV critic to admit but I just don’t know what to make of Britannia,…
More than ever, this was Ulysses’ show: Royal Opera’s Return of Ulysses reviewed
Spoiler alert: the final image of John Fulljames’s production of Monteverdi’s The Return of Ulysses at the Roundhouse is haunting.…
You just can’t argue against Hanks and Streep: The Post reviewed
Steven Spielberg’s The Post, which dramatizes the Washington Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971, doesn’t exactly push at…
