How ever did the inbred Habsburgs control their vast empire?
For centuries, a line of mentally retarded monarchs managed extraordinary feats of engineering across the world against all odds
The dirty war of Sefton Delmer
Anything to break German morale was allowable in Delmer’s broadcasts from Wavendon Towers – which purported to come from a disgruntled character within Nazi Germany
How much would your family stump up for your ransom?
Researching The Price of Life, Jenny Kleeman interviews Stephen Collet, who describes haggling for a year with the Somali pirates who kidnapped his sister in October 2009
Work, walk, meditate: Practice, by Rosalind Brown, reviewed
An Oxford undergraduate makes a detailed plan for getting the most out of a quiet Sunday in January, but soon starts musing on what it feels like to be distracted
Conning the booktrade connoisseurs
Fuelled by loathing and resentment, Thomas James Wise set about defrauding as many privileged bibliophiles as he could – only to be rumbled by two of their number
You are what you don’t eat
In the past, the ability to preserve food depended largely on people’s means, making Eleanor Barnett’s history of food waste also a history of changing attitudes to poverty
The end of days: It Lasts Forever And Then It’s Over, by Anne de Marcken, reviewed
‘Don’t try to picture the apocalypse’, advises the novel’s unnamed zombie narrator. ‘Everything looks exactly the way you remembered it.’
The stark horror of Barbara Comyns’s fiction was all too autobiographical
Comyns’s fans have long enjoyed the novels’ macabre details and black humour. Now Avril Horner reveals their disturbing sources
A web of rivalries: The Extinction of Irena Rey, by Jennifer Croft, reviewed
Eight translators gather to work on a novel written by their heroine, Irena Rey. But when she goes missing in a nearby forest, relations between them begin to fray
The tyranny of 1970s self-help gurus
Clients pursuing ’true self’ were expected to wear identical clothes, shave their heads, self-flagellate and be ‘given hell’, while paying through the nose for it
Don’t bother avoiding microplastics
They’re everywhere, it seems: in the oceans, the fish, the soil, our drinking water, our vegetables, our grains and cereals,…
Tokyo’s toilets aren’t that great
What is the world’s best city in which to be caught short? You can imagine a lively discussion on this…
How to sell The Spectator
No foreign power will ever be allowed to buy a UK newspaper or magazine: that’s the upshot of this week’s debate…
How Ozempic fattened up Denmark’s economy
It’s official: weight-loss wonder drug Wegovy (also marketed as Ozempic) makes US celebrities shrink but makes the Danish economy grow. This…
Porn project received thousands of pounds of Scottish taxpayers’ cash
Good heavens. Just when you think events north of the border can’t get any more ridiculous, they do. Now it…
It’s time to declare Putin an illegitimate president
For the next three days, Russians are heading to the polls supposedly to choose the country’s next president. Except we…
What America should heed from Julius Caesar’s assassination
It being the Ides of March, I thought it might be worth reflecting briefly on the most famous event that…
Rishi Sunak rules out general election in May
Rishi Sunak has finally confirmed what most MPs already knew: there won’t be a May general election. Speaking to ITV…
Can Meghan reinvent herself as a ‘lifestyle queen’?
It is a known, and lamented, fact that the rivalry between the Princess of Wales and the Duchess of Sussex…
Ukraine has brought the war back to Russian soil
Ukraine can’t stop Vladimir Putin’s re-election as Russian President on Sunday, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shatter the perfect…
