History
Flights of fancy
Levitation. We all know what it is: the ‘disregard for gravity’, as Peter Adey puts it in his new book,…
Wool, wheat and wet weather
Englishness is big business in the nation of shopkeepers, and not just in politics and tourism. In literature, the gypsy…
… and an awesome beak
The Enigma of Kidson is a quintessentially Etonian book: narcissistic, complacent, a bit silly and ultimately beguiling. It is the…
Out of sorts at the RSC
The RSC’s summer blockbuster is about Queen Anne. It’s called Queen Anne. It opens at the Inns of Court where…
Could vice-president Mike Pence be the most powerful man in America?
Let’s take stock. Donald Trump, until last week, had never done a government job or held an elected office. He…
1916: Sorry, President Wilson, but this is not a gentlemanly war
From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we…
Warning: there’s a plague of fake blue plaques
One of the great distinctions and pleasures of British life has been devalued by cheap imitations
The saddest, most romantic view in Britain
Is there a more forlornly romantic spot in Britain than the moors east of Inverness where the Jacobite dream died?…
BBC1’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems deliberately designed to flush out purists
Spoiler alerts aren’t normally required for reviews of Shakespeare — but perhaps I’d better issue one before saying that in…
Beautiful, wilful, never dull: in praise of Clumber spaniels
For the first time in more than 30 years we have no Clumber spaniel. We have had five: Henry, Judith,…
Britain’s fight with European law goes back 750 years
It is no surprise that the laws imposed on the UK by a European parliament in Brussels should so infuriate…
Benjamin Franklin: from man about town to man on the run
Just who was Benjamin Franklin? Apart, that is, from journalist, statesman, diplomat, founding father of the United States, inventor of…
What to do about Syria – the view from 1916
From ‘The future of Syria’, The Spectator, 5 February 1916: We say with all the emphasis at our command, and…
Here’s my solution to the problem of what to do with the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College
Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil…
The lovely Clare Valley, like southern France with added kangaroos
It is a century and a half since The Spectator noted the exceptional qualities of South Australia, a colony of…
China’s brutal one-child policy will be catastrophic for us all
China’s brutal one-child policy was not only inhuman; it will profoundly damage the rest of the world, says Hilary Spurling
Ancient and Modern
In Living with Difference, a think-tank report on the problems raised by a multi-faith UK, the chair Baroness Butler-Sloss says…
The Field Marshal, the restaurateur and the wine family
As the bottles flowed, the talk ranged, to a serious vineyard, an awesome Field Marshal and a delightful restauranteur. For…
The top loo books of 2015
There is not, sadly, a dedicated Trivia Books section in your local Waterstones, although at this time of year there…
The buildings we treasure most are often the ones we’ve never seen
Here are two books which have almost nothing in common: form, function, source material, methodology, all utterly different. The surprise…
The Church of England’s shameful betrayal of bishop George Bell
The Church of England has rushed to posthumously condemn one of the greatest men it has produced
Sri Lanka makes me yearn to be a pre-war tea planter
James Delingpole tastes bliss in the steamy heat
Notes from a very small island: wonderful, eccentric Ascension
A toast to Ascension Island – remote, eccentric, and now vital to the space race – on its 200th birthday
Can politicians say ‘crusade’ again? David Cameron thinks so
One thing grabbed my attention from David Cameron’s speech, long ago in the middle of last week. ‘We need a…
Proof that the British hardly ever had a stiff upper lip
The last time I cried was September 1989. That was my first week at public school. The reason I cried…
