Home > The Magazine > Cartoons

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Michael Henderson

Michael Henderson suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

Double trouble

Anthony Browne

Saturday, 1st October 2005

Anthony Browne on the marked increase in the number of twins and its social and economic consequences

When I told my friend the New York comedian Ophira Eisenberg that my wife was pregnant with twins, she didn’t boom ‘double trouble’, ‘twice the fun’, or ‘two for the price of one’. Instead, she leant over and whispered conspiratorially: ‘Twins are taking over the world.’

Laugh, I did. But I am not laughing now. Twins have not only taken over my home, but, following the traditional path to world domination, they are about to take over Poland. After last Sunday’s elections, Jaroslaw Kaczynski is in line to become the next prime minister, while his identical twin Lech is the front-runner in next fortnight’s presidential polls. The prospect of having genetic clones holding simultaneously the two greatest offices of state has proved too much even for the Kaczynski twins, who shot to fame as child stars in the film The Two That Stole The Moon. Jaroslaw has promised to stand down as PM if his twin gets the presidency.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Next page

More articles from: Anthony Browne | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Highs and lows on the laughometer

Bevis Hillier

Just What I Always Wanted: Unwrapping the World’s Most Curious Presents, by Robin Laurance

Murdoch’s big secret is that he doesn’t have one

Michael Wolff

Michael Wolff reveals how he secured Rupert Murdoch’s co-operation for his biography and discovered that this media titan has no interest in posterity. He is, at heart, a city editor

I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

Nancy Dell�Olio

Nancy Dell’Olio makes an impassioned case for Keynesian economics as the necessary remedy for the global crisis. It is to the Cambridge economist that we should turn once more

How I became Bulgaria’s etiquette guru

Dylan Jones

Dylan Jones is astonished to find in Sofia that the former communist country has embraced his guide to the mores of modern life — and that not everybody looks like Borat

Rudd has lurched from indecision to phoney war

Matthew Castray

Matthew Castray looks back on the Australian Prime Minister’s first year in office and audits an administration which has reviewed much and done very little

High Life

Taki

In praise of older women

A cliché too far

Deborah Ross

Taken
15, Nationwide

Our obsession with paedophilia is more dangerous than Gary Glitter’s return

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle says that the hunt for this foul child molester is the symptom of an unhealthy and disproportionate fixation that has spawned all sorts of absurd rules and regulations

Reading on the web is not really reading

Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby laments the intellectual crisis now gripping America and says that the torrent of digital infotainment is threatening basic literacy and news knowledge

It is commercial television that is really in peril

Neil Midgley

Channel 4 can’t afford Carol Vorderman and says it needs more cash for its public service remit. Nonsense, writes Neil Midgley: it is mass-market television that needs help