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Why New York loves John Bercow

2 February 2019 9:00 am

‘The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.’ This is a…

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What Sylvia learned at the constipation clinic

2 February 2019 9:00 am

‘The whole of my life I’ve had difficulty.’ I heard Sylvia say this through the door, which was slightly ajar.…

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My old horse was tough, ferocious and violent – and I loved her as much as she loved me

2 February 2019 9:00 am

Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how…

Roger Federer during his fourth round match against Stefanos Tsitsipas in the 2019 Australian Credit: photo by Jack Thomas/Getty Images

My hero Roger Federer

26 January 2019 9:00 am

Asked how he was feeling as he was about to give a speech to a ladies group, Mark Twain, looking…

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When a reader invited me to stay with him in Exmoor estate, how could I refuse?

26 January 2019 9:00 am

My first night back in Blighty, I sat all evening at the kitchen table drinking wine with a charming, courteous…

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Surrey’s Gore-tex-collar crime wave

26 January 2019 9:00 am

The frustrating thing about rights is that when you give them to people they don’t cherish and appreciate them. They…

Photo by Alain Grosclaude/Agence Zoom/Getty Images

Taki: Should I just move to a cave in France?

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad   Do any of you know what cisgender is? I just found out. Cisgender is a term that describes…

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Hell — and heaven – on the French Riviera

19 January 2019 9:00 am

We drove down from the hills to visit friends of friends with a house by the sea and on the…

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Despite me virtually sexting him, my blacksmith is ignoring me — just like all the others before him

19 January 2019 9:00 am

Splitting the atom is nothing compared to figuring out how to get hold of your farrier. Why is the farrier…

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Why 1919 wasn’t the year it’s cracked up to be

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read…

I ended New Year’s Eve more sober than I started it

12 January 2019 9:00 am

We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would…

The Kafkaesque nightmare of cancelling my BT broadband

12 January 2019 9:00 am

Oh, I suppose I might as well give it a whirl, I thought, as the recorded voice began its dirge:…

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In praise of pomposity

5 January 2019 9:00 am

Gstaad My annual end-of-year party in the Bagel was a bust. Too many people brought their friends and I ended…

Jeremy Clarke and Baroness Trumpington

From Baroness Trumpington to bad sex: my Christmas party week

5 January 2019 9:00 am

The Airbnb accommodation at Paddington, chez Mohammed, was a fourth-floor room measuring about nine feet by five. As well as…

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A festive rapprochement with the ex-builder boyfriend

5 January 2019 9:00 am

1 January. Rooms left in house to decorate: 1 (only the attic, therefore doesn’t count).Walls plastered by self with no…

US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House, March

Why I have fallen out of love with Donald Trump

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Here we are, 41 years down the road, and I’m once again writing for The Spectator’s Christmas issue. This is…

Why you should never read your own diary

15 December 2018 9:00 am

At the turn of the century, I started a diary. I’ve mostly typed it on old typewriters, bashing out a…

How Ebenezer Grayling destroyed the Kite family Christmas

15 December 2018 9:00 am

Ebenezer Grayling sat busy in his counting house. It was a cold, bleak day at the Department for Transport. Big…

Times Square

New York: the fact – and fiction

8 December 2018 9:00 am

New York At times I used to think the place was real. The New York of films, that is. The…

We lost our elderly, dementing French charge

8 December 2018 9:00 am

I entered the cave house carrying groceries and panting from the climb to find an old hippie woman displaying rugs…

My Christmas tree health-and-safety nightmare

8 December 2018 9:00 am

Decorating a tree on the unfinished minstrels’ gallery was an appealing idea if only for the health and safety violations.…

Homo floresiensis, living on the Indonesian island of Flores as recently as 18,000 years ago, had a skull the size of a grapefruit

Human evolution: a short essay

1 December 2018 9:00 am

This makes Brexit take a back seat: hints of ancient life have appeared on Mars. Carbon building blocks and other…

‘Yellow Vest’ (gilets jaunes) protesters continue to block French roads in protest against — everything

Only a Leaver would be stupid enough to go to the wrong airport

1 December 2018 9:00 am

Three of us on a cold metal bench waiting for the bus. It’s almost dark. Winter arrived yesterday and we…

The joy of dentristy

I was right; the vet was wrong; and the scary sexy dentist sorted out the horses

1 December 2018 9:00 am

The horse dentist is handsome, with blond windswept hair and a weather-beaten face. There is something Heathcliffian about him, something…

An extraordinary encounter in a New York taxi

24 November 2018 9:00 am

New York   If I wrote this in one of those newspaper diaries about metropolitan life, no one would believe…