Life
The healing power of wine
What goes best with a broken rib? The answer, I think, is any drink you enjoy that will not make…
Will Starmer make the Online Safety Act even worse?
Good God, there’s a lot of guff being talked about the Online Safety Act. This was a piece of legislation…
The myth about electric car owners
Every time I write about electric cars, there is an explosion of hostile comments online in which readers angrily denounce…
Dear Mary: how can I deter the creep at my pub quiz?
Q. I have been pitched into a social dilemma regarding Glyndebourne, which I live near to but don’t go to…
Immateriality – or irrelevance?
In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have…
Spectator Competition: As they prefer it
In Competition 3362 you were invited to submit a passage from Shakespeare as rewritten by the sensitivity reader. The entries were…
The ‘Clooney effect’ hasn’t touched my corner of Provence
Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town…
Is beekeeping left-wing?
‘Zip my head in,’ he said, after climbing into a white jumpsuit with a mesh helmet. It was a beekeeper’s…
Grandmaster Royal
The British Championships, which concluded in Hull earlier this month, saw a notable achievement for 15-year-old Shreyas Royal, whose stellar…
Language
A Speccie reader has been in touch to complain about the use of the expressions ‘wind farm’ and ‘solar farm’.…
Aussie life
Off the beach of Ipanema where the tall and tanned girls go, they’ve found Brazilian sharks with cocaine in their…
Free speech stops riots
With depressing predictability, the riots have led to calls for more censorship. Historically, it was the authoritarian right who blamed…
Dear Mary: how do I set up two young people?
Q. I have invited some younger friends to stay with me at a family house in Spain. Among the party…
This Olympics belongs to the female athletes
You knew it was going to be a superb Olympics from the moment Celine Dion belted out an Edith Piaf…
What is ‘thuggery’?
The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than…
Being mugged changes you forever
Being mugged changes you forever. My encounter with highwaymen occurred three decades ago in a south London street, in the…
