Smoking
How we became addicted to vaping
For those of us with a poor grasp of time, who can still recall when a night at the pub…
Why Mummy smokes
It’s 7.02 p.m. and I’m standing outside my house by the bins smoking a fag. Upstairs, I can hear that…
Smoking is more hassle than it’s worth
I gave up smoking one year ago this week, as part of a series of pitiful capitulations to the forces…
A belter of a podcast, featuring a mad South African: Smoke Screen reviewed
I go back and forth on tobacco companies. On the one hand, they are merchants of death. On the other,…
Saint Jacinda's war on fags
It is a curious irony that the West’s leading progressive icon is probably the most authoritarian leader in the free world…
The WHO’s bizarre war on e-cigarettes
The WHO’s fervent campaign against e-cigarettes
Covid has killed off our civil liberties
It started with smoking. The 1960s and 1970s saw little popular objection to legislation restricting advertisements by private companies purveying…
If anything is ‘essential’ right now, it’s cigarettes
The owners of my local grocery shop, a mile or so from my house, very kindly sell me cigarettes in…
How many Britons now vape?
Talking Turkey David Cameron again accused the Leave campaign of ‘lying’ about the prospect of Turkey joining the EU. A…
Dear Mary: How much should I tip a black cab driver?
Q. We have near neighbours in the country with whom I would not wish to fall out for all sorts…
Dear Mary: How do I stop people cadging cigarettes off me?
Q. My mother died a few months ago. Her collection of colourful clothes, hats, shoes and an immense amount of…
The truth about air quality? It’s the best (and cleanest) in living memory
We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health…
How smoking saved my life
I almost got killed this week. I went for a very early morning walk in a New Hampshire forest, in…
Letters
Technical education Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the…
Being anti-smoking damages your mental health
I lit a cigarette in an open-air car park a couple of years ago as I was walking to the…
Smokers are paying for your pension
Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and…
The vaping craze isn’t about nicotine. It’s about gadgets
Probably you never visited the flats of middle-class student drug dealers in the 1990s, because crikey, neither did I, and…
An old man’s guide to living dangerously
At 77, it is clear to me that increased longevity can be a curse rather than a blessing
Mark Twain was right: it is our redeeming petty vices that make life worth living
Here I go again. I have stopped smoking. Until recently I had been smoking about 40 cigarettes a day, but…
She was Ariadne to my Theseus
My contempt for vaping deepened as vaping contraptions became more ostentatious and people started hanging them from lanyards around their…
The smoking diary of Gregor Hens
The link between smoking and self-expression is long-established. The only thing worse than not being able to smoke, says Will…
‘Quitting is suffering’: Hon Lik, inventor of the e-cigarette, on why he did it
Hon Lik, life-saving inventor of the e-cigarette, on why he did it
Spectator letters: Allan Massie on the FBI; Christopher Booker on graffiti
The long arm of the FBI Sir: The White House may be less willing than it was to play the…
The wonderful, vanishing world of the handwritten letter
Peter Oborne 4 July 2015 9:00 am
In praise of the old-fashioned letter-writer