History
Reading Norman Davies’s global history is like wading through porridge
For many of us, life has become global. Areas which were previously tranquil backwaters are now hives of international activity.…
Why has there never been a hit musical about the history of Britain?
Americans may be able to draw on only 250 years of history, but they’re not shy of making a song…
From blissful dawn to bleak despair: the end of the revolutionary dream
Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were undergraduates when they met in June 1794, Coleridge at Cambridge university and Southey…
Broken dreams
In the expensive realm of musical comedy, it’s impossible to predict what will take off and what will crash and…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
Pleasure palaces and hidden gems
Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Out of sorts at the RSC
The RSC’s summer blockbuster is about Queen Anne. It’s called Queen Anne. It opens at the Inns of Court where…
Trump’s inside man
Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He…
Against armistice
From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we…
Blue plaque blues
One of the great distinctions and pleasures of British life has been devalued by cheap imitations
Brodie Castle
Is there a more forlornly romantic spot in Britain than the moors east of Inverness where the Jacobite dream died?…
Impure thoughts
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
Clumber spaniels
For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith,…
Henry III vs EU law
It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate…
An electrifying politician
Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…
What to do with Syria?
From ‘The future of Syria’, The Spectator, 5 February 1916: We say with all the emphasis at our command, and…
Rhodes’s statue should remain, on one condition
Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil…
The Clare Valley
It is a century and a half since The Spectator noted the exceptional qualities of South Australia, a colony of…
One for all
China’s brutal one-child policy was not only inhuman; it will profoundly damage the rest of the world, says Hilary Spurling
Plato and think-tanks
In Living with Difference, a think-tank report on the problems raised by a multi-faith UK, the chair Baroness Butler-Sloss says…
Commanding vintages
As the bottles flowed, the talk ranged, to a serious vineyard, an awesome Field Marshal and a delightful restauranteur. For…
