Media
Fame at last
There’s nothing like getting your face on the telly to turn you into a narcissist overnight
How to keep your corporate reputation: forget the CSR, just get the basics right
A theme of this autumn has been conversations about corporate reputation and how it is guarded or lost. To name…
Aristophanes on the Fake Sheikh
Undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the Fake Sheikh, has been accused of dodgy dealing in luring the innocent…
The White Widow myth
Samantha Lewthwaite almost certainly isn’t as monstrous as the papers say. And she definitely isn’t as important
The ‘no’ campaign’s problem was that it sounded like me
Journalistically speaking, it’s been a good year to be Scottish and Jewish. Had I been a Welsh Zoroastrian, say, I…
Assange is a narcissist and a nut – but if America ever comes for him, we should take his side
Poor Julian Assange. Call me a contrarian but I’m genuinely starting to feel sorry for the guy. He’s just made…
Dinner with the paparazzi
Here then is Gatsby’s house, after an invasion by the Daily Mail. It is called the Chiltern Firehouse. It is…
Dear Mary
Q. On arrival at a top level dinner, I was surprised to see at the table a woman who, I…
Diary
Last October, in these very pages, I wrote with what is now annoying prescience, ‘Like almost everyone else in the…
Dinner with the editors
Moro (‘moorish’ or ‘sexist’) is a Spanish restaurant on Exmouth Market, near the bones of the old Guardian and Observer…
Serious fun
Media moguls aren’t philosophers. So it’s time for philosophers to become media moguls
Forgive me, Father
What Catholics really talk about in the confession box
Diary
When visiting Britain and Australia last November, I discovered that the mayor of Toronto, Robert Ford, is now the world’s…
How the MPs’ expenses scandal proves the wisdom of Alain de Botton
Whenever I’m tempted to pretend to be nicer so that fewer people hate me, I remember my old friend Alain…
The Spectator’s Notes
There has naturally been plenty of unfavourable comment on how the Revd Paul Flowers, the ‘crystal Methodist’, was allowed by…
Diary
A great night to be in Pittsburgh. The local baseball team, the Pirates, were attempting to reach their first play-offs…
Boring politicians are a threat to democracy. That means you, Rachel Reeves
I’ve never met the woman that the Newsnight editor Ian Katz this week accidentally described as ‘boring, snoring Rachel Reeves’,…
Diary
The astonishing level of enthusiasm over the birth of the new prince goes far beyond the pleasure that people naturally…
Columnists are still partisan. Our readers aren’t
An email exchange with a Conservative-leaning friend this week left me feeling sheepish. But if shameful my behaviour be, I’m…
