Travel
Bridge to the past
What Britain can learn from Romania
I need a holiday from my holiday
Reading about all the travel chaos, I began to regret my summer holiday plans. Wouldn’t it have been more sensible…
The best journey in the world
Nothing compares with Antarctica
Southeastern’s on the wrong track
A few years ago I wrote here about the unexpected symbiosis between economy passengers and business travellers on commercial flights.…
Letter from Mongolia
The first time I went to Mongolia was in 2014, when I travelled across the country with the actress Michelle…
Time to think about holidays
Having returned from a fortnight’s break, I wonder if we get holidays all wrong. In northern Europe, the custom is…
Barometer
Of mice and Moon What did Nasa achieve last time it visited the Moon? Apollo 17, in December 1972, involved…
Diary
We left prepared. Bottles of water, protein snacks, phone chargers, portable Scrabble (even the teenagers can look at the internet…
Grand tours and package holidays
In September 2019, Thomas Cook filed for compulsory liquidation, leaving 600,000 customers stranded abroad. It was a sorry end to…
Did the earth move for you?
I’m writing this on the plane back from Iceland, a fact that fills me with relief. Not because I didn’t…
Diary
The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of…
Half blind to the world
In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…
My Icelandic holiday with Kevin and Perry
I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like…
What’s in my frunk?
Hello, and welcome to episode one of What’s in My Frunk?, the first in an occasional Spectator series of news…
Top flight
Why Ryanair is Europe’s best airline
Airport officials are on a power trip
On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped…
Low life
On the morning of my last day in England, I drew back a curtain and there in the garden, browsing…
Gone but not forgotten
Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses,…
My nightmare weekend of deer and dogs
Caroline and I are just back from a weekend break in Scotland and, nice though it was, I hadn’t realised…
A love-late relationship
‘Dad, why is it that whenever we go anywhere, we’re always running to catch a train?’ asked Charlie, my 13-year-old.…
End of the line
It’s time to rethink the queue
Portrait of the week
Home To prevent a shortage of meat, which relies on carbon dioxide in its packaging, the government gave millions of…
A family pilgrimage
It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…
Travel sick
The great holiday Covid test rip-off
High on the hog
The Pig at Bridge Place is not a pig in possession of a country house, but I would be for…
