If you’re not tired of London, you’re tired of life
London, city of the damned. City of incendiary tower blocks, jihadi mentals trying to slit your throat, yokels from Somerset…
The Spectator’s Notes
How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s…
Bridge
The past two weeks have seen hundreds of passionate bridge players head for Montecatini in Italy for the 8th European…
Great Tigran’s heir
Tigran Petrosian is the great chess hero of Armenia. World champion from 1963-1969, his best games exhibit a profundity which…
no. 462
White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-Giri, Stavanger 2017. How can White exploit the terrible position of…
The Britten Theatre
When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I…
Brief encounter
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…
Non-magnetic north
Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue…
His Master’s Feet
Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer…
Tall story
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…
Trouble in paradise
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…
Peter Perrett: How The West Was Won
Much though I loved it at the time, not a great deal of lasting worth came out of that fervid…
An unholy alliance
Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk…
Europe’s imploding right
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it…
The bigger, better society
The last housing scandal in Notting Hill brought down a Conservative government and transformed the social policy of Britain. Peter…
This uneasy dawn
The Tory party is having the wrong conversation. Whenever two or three Conservative MPs are gathered together, they discuss who…
Harry Potter and the millennial mind
Which Hogwarts house would you be in? There are four options, and everybody fits into one. The brave and chivalrous…
To a young Corbynista
Dear John, I really hope you won’t be offended by this letter from your uncle. I have nothing but respect…
Boiling point
Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver.…
Can these bones live?
BBC Radio 4 – The Reith lectures A few years back, before I began writing novels about the Tudors, my…
Coffee break
I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with…
Twin peaks
In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable…
Hymn to self-slaughter
Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on…
Warsaw Diary
When one first lands in Warsaw, it’s easy to dismiss the prevailing Soviet realist architecture. The endless blocks of flats…
Political clerihew
In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular…
