Decline and fall: how university education became infantilised
Last month, after 21 years study-ing and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job.…
What would it mean to ‘decolonise’ the Classics?
Can the Classics escape the grip of their past?
The Spectator’s love affair with satire
The Spectator’s love affair with satire
The Spectator's archives are full of surprises
The Spectator now has now reached a milestone unmatched in the global press, by becoming the first magazine to publish…
Why The Spectator is a true survivor
As print titles battle logistical disruption and falling sales from Covid-19, it’s worth saluting The Spectator’s long-lasting tenacity. It has…
‘Desolate, despairing and awful’: Britain’s uninhabitable island
In 1978, an invitation was sent to some 200 members of Oxford’s Dangerous Sports Club, which simply read: ‘Tea, Rockall,…
The Spectator becomes the world’s longest-lived current affairs magazine
This weekend The Spectator reaches a truly historic milestone. For forty years, it has been the oldest current-affairs or literary…
How do Britain’s pubs get their names?
An easy one: what links Jack Straw’s Castle, The Labouring Boys and The Jolly Taxpayer? No, not the parliamentary expenses…
The big difference between a pile of stones and Piles of Stones
There are piles of stones and then there are piles of stones. Anyone can place one rock upon another, but…
The National Student Survey is having a terrible effect on academia
Should university students really feel ‘satisfied’? Or would we rather they felt challenged? For the honchos of higher education, the…
British street names: short, simple and unpretentious
You know where you are with a British street name. I don’t mean literally. I mean there’s a tacit humility…
The truth about The Watford Gap
In a shallow dip between two unremarkable Northamptonshire hills you will find a road, a motorway, a railway and a…
Persistent buggers
The credit for decriminalising male homosexuality in 1967 — for those over 21 in England and Wales at least —…
She-devils on horseback
Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…
Writing wrongs
Does anyone still care about handwriting? Although it was for centuries the medium and motor of daily life, handwriting has…
Scafell Pike
Within a couple of miles of England’s deepest point is its highest. Towering a kilometre above the hidden depths of…
Keep the change
Can we do without cash? Since 2015, digital payments in the UK have outnumbered those in cash, and we are…
