I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a bit sorry for Mike Harding. The long-serving host of BBC Radio 2’s ‘folk, roots and acoustic’ show was given the heave-ho last month, and the far-from-underemployed Mark Radcliffe took his place last week. One might ask what Harding had done wrong, and indeed Harding has been asking
Isn’t it time, just out of perversity, that we all signed the petition on the Operation Black Vote website to restore the part-time nurse Mary Seacole to the national curriculum? I am beginning to think that our children should learn all about this entertaining woman; she’s given me a good laugh for the last dozen
The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in
In the good old days of the gay liberation movement, in the 1970s and early 1980s, the excitement of challenging the orthodoxy attracted even the shy and apolitical to its cause. To those of us around at the time, it felt like a cultural insurgency: a rejection of compulsory heterosexuality and the lifestyle that accompanied
‘Mary and Geordie have lost a child …Why should they feel they are entitled to grieve? It’s so commonplace.’ Paul Torday’s latest novel is full of such assertions. We are in the Border country, in 2010, and three children have disappeared. Neither the police nor social services can be persuaded to take much interest. ‘Tell
If you consider ‘gripping metafiction’ a self-contradictory phrase (surely metafiction disables tension through its wink-at-the-audience style?), Nicholas Royle’s First Novel (Cape, £16.99), which is in fact his seventh, may change your mind. Royle (pictured above) teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in this book he gives us Paul Kinder, who teaches creative writing at
It is rare to encounter a writer whose work can be so neatly divided into two halves. George Saunders is known as a satirist with an interest in consumerism and the technology of the near future, but occasionally he will publish moving, sometimes brutal social realist tales. Early stories such as ‘Christmas’ were like strange,
With nice ecumenical parity, Peter Somerville-Large derides equally both Ireland’s principal Christian churches as they compete for the soul, or at least the membership, of young Paul Blake-Willoughby. His discordant Ascendancy parents, a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, are on what the late Brian Inglis, an esteemed Spectator editor, called ‘a descendancy course’. Somerville-Large,
Acquainted with Stravinsky, friend of Ravel and Poulenc, prolific composer and well-loved man, Lennox Berkeley (1903-1989) remains an enigma to most of us even if we know little of his enormous output of songs, symphonies, ballets and spiritually inclined choral music. His close friendship and early collaboration with Britten, a decade his junior, will ensure
In Competition No. 2779 you were invited to submit Maud’s reply to Tennyson. It was Joyce Grenfell’s magnificently ball-breaking riposte to the invitation to ‘Come into the garden, Maud’ that inspired the challenge, and in general your responses referenced this section of the poem. You were on equally feisty form, having little truck with the
In his introduction, James Fergusson apologises for the title of his book. Somalia, he writes, may no longer be the most dangerous place on earth. Since the summer of 2012, a newly elected government under a former university professor who once worked for the UN is bringing stability to the country, exiled Somalis are going
On 10 June 1840 an 18-year-old out-of-work Londoner named Edward Oxford cocked his pistol and fired two shots at Queen Victoria as she made her daily carriage drive with Prince Albert on Constitution Hill. Oxford was mobbed by the crowd, who shouted ‘Kill him!’ He was charged with high treason. Though he claimed that his
I can’t read fiction any more And that’s a fact. Don’t ask me why. God only knows, old fruit. If a poem doesn’t rhyme, forget it. I certainly have. Today’s lunch Was a damned good salmon en croute, And tomorrow more tests, more tests To hear my ticker count its beats Like Tennyson. So put
‘You’re not going to believe this,’ crackled the voice over the Buckinghamshire police radio in the pre-dawn light of Thursday 8 August 1963. ‘They’ve stolen a train.’ Fifty years on, we can’t believe it either. And to the extent that we do, our fascination with the Great Train Robbery shows no sign of fading. It’s
The subtitle of Deirdre David’s life of Olivia Manning, ‘A Woman at War’, has a resonant double meaning. She was, as we are repeatedly informed, a unique example of a woman novelist who wrote as well about war and battles as a man. But she was also at war with herself, with her colleagues, and,
Lots of people have subsequently discovered this important imperial maxim: ‘Don’t invade Afghanistan.’ But the first western power to demonstrate the point of it was the British, in the late 1830s. The First Afghan War is the most famous of Queen Victoria’s ‘little wars’ for its almost perfect catastrophe. The British went in, installed a
Andrew Marr is recovering from a stroke in hospital, the BBC has said this evening. We at Coffee House wish him well in his recovery. The BBC’s statement on Andrew Marr’s condition: “Andrew Marr was taken ill yesterday and taken to hospital. The hospital confirmed he has had a stroke. His doctors say he is
David Cameron’s big Europe speech is now less than a fortnight away. It will be, I suspect, the most consequential speech of his premiership. When you look at the challenges involved, one can see why the speech has been delayed so many times. Cameron needs to say enough to reassure his party, which has never
Seemed a good idea at the time. Ed Miliband decided that the progress report published by the Coalition is a ‘secret audit’. At today’s PMQs he accused Cameron of sneaking it out in order to dodge bad coverage. Poor old Ed. He can’t read the chess-match more than one move ahead. The PM gave the
He might want to stay Prime Minister until 2020, but who will succeed David Cameron once he’s gone? In this week’s Spectator, Bruce Anderson offers his own tip for the next Conservative leader: David Cameron has announced that he would like to stay in No. 10 until at least 2020. That is excellent news for
