Christopher Howse 
The Serpent’s Promise, by Steve Jones - review
The weight of bacteria that each of us carries around is equal to that of our brain, a kilogram of the creatures, billions of them, ten times as many in… Read more
‘Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase', by J. Redding Ware - review
James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He… Read more
Christmas Quiz
It’s time for the immemorial Christmas custom in which the family gathers round the iPad, cracks another walnut, and sharpens its competitive claws on the Spectator’s traditional challenge to suppressed… Read more
The answers
Weird world 1 Mark Rothko’s 2 George Washington 3 Nadine Dorries 4 The Duchess of Cornwall 5 Sakhalin 6 The 158th Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race 7 Harry Redknapp, when… Read more
The beating of heavenly wings
How did the cherubim, solemn figures of beaten gold in the Holy of Holies of the Hebrew Temple, become chubby toddlers (such as the pair in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), popular… Read more
Catalonia Notebook
We sang a hymn called ‘Poble en Marxa’ at the beginning of Mass in the working-class parish of Sant Blai. ‘Marxa’ was not a reference to the bearded prophet of… Read more
Spanish Notebook
Round a bend in the mountain path, between the flowering rosemary and the wild box bushes, above the spine of bare rock that stretched like a dragon’s tail hundreds of… Read more
Christmas Quiz
Set by Christopher Howse Illustrated by Castro Ipsissima verba In 2011, who said: 1 This is the most humble day of my life. 2 We will turn around the lives… Read more
Landscapes of grief
The caption on the photograph (above) makes a difference: ‘A young boy grieves at the funeral of his father who died of Aids at Ndola, Zambia, 2000.’ There were two… Read more
What the eye don’t see
Since I began to watch films on video and not so much in cinemas, I have found that I sometimes get the itch to rewind reality itself, in order… Read more
Low life and high style
In 1977, Roy Kerridge was a lavatory cleaner; in 1979 he was a well-known contributor to The Spectator. Yet this was no rags-to-riches discovery of a literary talent. Apart from… Read more
Into the maze
With its fretted Gothic canopies, the railway station at Oxford (before it was torn down) seemed to ‘whisper to the tourist the last enchantments of the Middle Age’, joked Max… Read more
Christmas Quiz
They can talk In 2010, who said: 1 ‘That was a disaster – they should never have put me with that woman. Whose idea was that? It’s Sue I think.… Read more
The spur of the moment
A memorable image by André Kertész shows a steam train passing over a high viaduct behind a row of peeling French houses next to a demolition site while a man… Read more
Sweeter than honey
The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course.… Read more
Jail birds
Next to his photographs of 40 women who have spent time in Low Newton prison, Adrian Clarke has juxtaposed short accounts from each of how she got there. Low Newton,… Read more
Suburban hymns
Arcade Fire’s third album The Suburbs is in a long, glorious tradition of pop lyricism inspired by everyday life, writes Christopher Howse Arcade Fire’s first album Funeral was not about… Read more
Fathoming the wine-dark sea
Gladstone found something very strange indeed in Homer, but the world was treating the future prime minister warily when he published his findings. It was 1858, the year he sailed… Read more
So were the Noughties nice?
Outside my local pub it says in big letters ‘£500’, and underneath: ‘This is the fine if you take your drink out into the street.’ What law imposes this fine,… Read more
Latest blogs
- Rupert Murdoch: Cameron’s in trouble – I read it in The Spectator. Fraser Nelson
- Lamont: QE is blowing another bubble. It will soon meet a pin. Norman Lamont
- Can any government really expect to carry out ambitious reform? Isabel Hardman
- Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend Camilla Swift
- Drummer Lee Rigby Douglas Murray
- Eight Golden Rules for Tragedy Tweeting Freddy Gray
- Government behaving badly over ‘quietly aborted’ lobbying reform Iain Anderson
