Harvard
Affirmative action was hurting black students
Harvard may have a slightly more difficult time poaching black students from Boston College, Miami University of Ohio, or other…
Life’s great dilemma: Either/Or, by Elif Batuman, reviewed
In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif…
A fantastic online show of Euripides's take on Helen of Troy
Everyone knows Helen of Troy. The feckless sex popsicle betrayed her husband, Menelaus, and ran off with the dashing Paris,…
Obama’s disappearing legacy
This article is in The Spectator’s August 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. The presidency of Barack Obama was heralded…
The Ivy League’s dirty secret
New York There comes a point in a New York expat’s life when you suddenly realise that the liberal elites…
Letters: Judging students by achievement is a greater scourge than diversity at any cost
Harvard’s racial quotas Sir: While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’, 23 June),…
Not one of my Harvard students thinks Brexit is a good idea
My wife laughs that my love of gadgets is a remnant of my Communist upbringing, when western toys were objects…
Sappho in America
We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…
T.S. Eliot’s crisis year: exhaustion, hair loss and a wrecked marriage
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
‘Asexual’ used to mean something even creepier than ‘Edward Heath’
There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on…
William Waldegrave: too nice ever to have been PM
‘Lobbying,’ writes William Waldegrave in this extraordinary memoir, ‘takes many forms.’ But he has surely reported a variant hitherto unrecorded…
Left-handed people are stupid (and everyone who worries about immigration is a bigot)
Thoroughly cheering news emerged this week that left-handed people are likely to earn between 10 and 12 per cent less…
Up close and personal
In recycling his most intimate encounters as fiction – including amazing feats of promiscuity in small-town New England – John Updike drew unashamedly on his own experiences for inspiration, says Philip Hensher
Want Hollywood's conventional wisdom? Then read Blockbusters
You can learn a lot from this book. Latin America has a smaller economy than Europe. Big companies can spend…
