A few months ago, one of the organisers of the Oxford Literary Festival contacted me. Hi Nick I may be putting on a free speech event at Oxford Lit Festival 2-10 April 2016 and wondered if you’d be willing to take part? It’s the usual festival deal. As I have written a book on free
Like most trade unionists in the 1970s and 80s I worked with a fair few communists. Men like Dickie Lawlor, Jock Cowan and Maurice Styles, postal workers for whom all events were viewed through the prism of ‘scientific socialism’. Communism gave them a philosophy by which to live their lives, and they were respected as
If Britain were to vote to leave the EU, we’d promptly set about agreeing our own trade deals as a sovereign nation. But what about our new trade deal with the EU itself? What conditions would this wounded beast set, and might we end up accepting the diktats and red tape that drove us mad in the first place?
Before the election, the Tories talked about introducing a British Bill of Rights in their first 100 days in office. But eight months on from the election, the government hasn’t even started consulting on it yet. Some of this delay is understandable. When Michael Gove was made Justice Secretary, he wanted to work out his
There should be a short booklet with a list of points for those about to take up public sector appointments — not the formal rules, which already exist, but certain informal tips for survival. One would be ‘Do not own — or at least visit in the winter — any house in a hot place
The latest challenge was to compose up to 16 lines of macaronic verse. A dictionary of poetic terms will tell you that macaronic is a verse form popularised by Teofilo Folengo, a Mantuan monk, which uses a mixture of languages, normally with a comic or satirical intent. I prefer E.O. Parrott’s elegant definition: ‘a school
That’s it. The nanny state has won. The nudgers and naggers are victorious. The buzzkilling, behaviour-policing new elite that sees smoking as sinful, boozing as lethal and being podgy as immoral has conquered the political sphere. Its miserabilist writ now extends even into a political zone where once it held no sway: Boris Johnson’s brain.
If anyone is feeling pleased about the slide on the stock-market today, it is probably Andrew Roberts, the RBS analyst who hit the headlines this week with a note advising everyone to ‘sell everything’. Probably rather sooner than he expected, and before any of his clients even had time to panic properly, prices have started
When David Cameron was photographed scoffing Pringles on an Easy Jet flight over the summer, he became the subject of much mockery online. However, there was one woman who fiercely leapt to his defence, arguing that he deserved better than a budget snack on a budget airline. ‘David Cameron deserves official jet,’ Fiona Phillips declared in the Mirror.
Though I adored David Bowie as a teenybopper, I felt that one would have had to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the lush smorgasbord of lachrymosity that accompanied his death earlier this week. I said as much in a short blog on these very pages. Soon I was trending on Twitter,
The Today programme often has one choking on one’s porridge, but this morning’s edition had an item even more infuriating than usual. A barrister who had represented one of the men accused in last April’s Hatton Garden raid - in this case acquitted - was invited onto the show to speak of his ‘grudging admiration’ for the men who
Ross Douthat’s 10 points about immigration is recommended reading for anyone sitting on the fence or who tends towards the open border position; even if you disagree, you’ll at least have an idea of what the opposition believe. Personally I agree with it all anyway and my opinions on the subject are as frozen in aspic
My line on the Anglican crisis is a bit eccentric. I think there are now grounds for hope that the Communion can survive – and the reason is the recent rise of gay marriage as the central issue. Lazy punditry says that gay marriage is the bone of contention. But it’s actually a new issue
George Osborne’s Newsnight interview has drawn ire from the Eurosceptics chiefly because the Chancellor used it to stamp on any suggestion that there might be a second EU referendum in which Brussels offered the UK all the changes it wanted in the first place in order to tempt it back into the European Union. But
No amount of reports in the press that Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet-making is farcical and his party is divided should distract us from the fact that he is winning. I don’t mean that he will become prime minister, or even (though this seems quite possible) that he will survive as leader until the general election.
The new year has not started well for France. On the last day of 2015 – the most traumatic year for the French in decades because of the twin attacks in Paris – president Francois Hollande warned the nation in his traditional New Year’s Eve address: ‘France is not done with terrorism… these tragic events
An excellent recent article by Dominic Lawson in Standpoint magazine reminded me of the greatness of Paul Keres. The Estonian grandmaster,whose centenary falls this month, was silver medallist in no fewer than four world championship Candidates tournaments. (I will be writing about him next week.) Another illustrious player (one with the same first name) is
White to play. This is from Fischer-Benko, US Championship, New York 1963. The obvious 1 e5 is successfully parried by 1 … f5. What did Fischer do instead? Answers to me at The Spectator by Tuesday 19 January or via email to victoria@spectator.co.uk or by fax on 020 7681 3773. There is a prize of £20 for
I remember the shock, like a jolt of static electricity. One day, between taking my degree and beginning my first job, while looking through a 16th-century book about numerology that had once belonged to John Dee in the British Library, I came upon an annotation in his own neat italic hand casting up the numerical
Michael Craig-Martin has had a paradoxical career. He is, I think, a disciple of Marcel Duchamp. But the latter famously gave up painting in favour of something more conceptual — ready-mades and whatnot — whereas Craig-Martin began with Duchampian concepts. He once exhibited a glass of water on a shelf together with a claim that
