Letters
Party politics Sir: I don’t think it is true that I would be unhappy in any party, as Ross Clark…
The Spectator’s Notes
We are not allowed to know any details about the Muslim woman, charged with intimidating a witness, who has been…
Nick Clegg should stick with the devil he knows
I write this in Glasgow, at the Lib Dem conference. Nick Clegg has invented a constitutional doctrine. The doctrine teaches…
Does the BMA prefer real fags to e-cigarettes?
What strategy should we adopt to cope with the British Medical Association? Its members kill more people each year than…
Twitter looks much more expensive than Royal Mail, but which one will last longer?
Royal Mail delivers to 29 million UK addresses; last year it generated £9 billion of revenues, of which £324 million…
Ed Miliband’s last laugh
Unless something drastic changes in the polls, the Tories will pay dearly for treating Miliband as a joke. And so will the rest of us
A Blairite for Ed
Tristram Hunt represents the slice of Labour that Miliband most needs to hold on to
Merkel will win – but why?
Germany’s integrationalist elite are prepared to pay out forever to protect the euro
The mystery of ‘plebgate’
Was there a conspiracy against Andrew Mitchell? And why have the police gone quiet on the subject?
Notes on …Vodka
James Bond’s ‘Vodka martini, shaken, not stirred’ will never be a mark of sophistication for me because vodka and I…
Fresh wit and wisdom
A selection from the latest edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Gyles Brandreth
A Transylvanian notebook
Ehe-Gefängnis. The word, strictly speaking (which is how one should always speak), means ‘marriage prison’, and refers to an austere…
Darling Flufftail … beloved Pinkpaws
The correspondence between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy is good for celebrity-spotting but too cloyingly self-absorbed to be of wider interest, says D. J. Taylor
Another Old Wives’ Tale
Sathnam Sanghera, in his family memoir The Boy with the Topknot, heaped much largely affectionate contempt and ridicule on his…
Master of suspense
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
The power of the word
The recorder of early Jewish history has two sources of evidence. One is the Bible. Its centrality was brought home…
Shady groves of academe
The scene is the common room of All Souls College, Oxford, in the first week of March 1963. It is…
The name game
In South Korea, some 20 million people share just five surnames. Every one of Denmark’s top 20 surnames ends in…
Driving me crazy
My various Oxford dictionaries define bizarre as eccentric, whimsical, odd, grotesque, fantastic, mixed in style and half-barbaric. By so many…
Pericles for king
My brother Pericles Wyatt, as my father liked to say, is by blood the rightful king of England, the nephew…
All work and no play
Stage Blood, as its title suggests, is as full of vitriol, back-stabbing and conspiracy as any Jacobean tragedy. In this…
Flower power
After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar…
