Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

1828 and All That

Wednesday, 2nd January 2008

The year 2008 marks the 180th anniversary of The Spectator. The original Spectator, founded by Addison and Steele, ran only briefly from 1711 to 1712, although its spirit lives on in our Coffee House blog. Today’s Spectator was founded by Robert Stephen Rintoul, in 1828, and we shall be inviting readers to a series of events this year to celebrate.

In the year of this magazine’s foundation, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister; Andrew Jackson was elected President of the United States; Goya, Schubert and the 2nd Earl of Liverpool died; and Jules Verne, Ibsen, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tolstoy were born. Agitation for parliamentary reform became ever more insistent, paving the way for the 1832 Reform Act.

1 | 2 | 3 Next page

David Watkins

January 5th, 2008 12:47am

>...those who argue, ludicrously, that atrocities such as the 7/7 bombings would not have happened without the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003. This argument may, just possibly, be mistaken. But ludicrous? It is backed by the posthumous, tape-recorded testimony testimony of the 7/7 bombers. Presumably they knew their reasons better than anyone, and since they knew that they were going to their deaths they had no obvious motive for lying. I have purchased the Spectator for over forty years. Very often I have sharply disagreed with its editorial opinions. This is, I think, the first time a Spectator editorial has grossly insulted my intelligence.

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Diary

Penny Smith

Penny Smith gives a rundown of her week

The NHS needs its Reformation

The Spectator on reforming the NHS

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House