Winemaker’s lunch with Beltrán Domecq

Join us in the Spectator boardroom on Tuesday 12 April for the next in this year’s series of Spectator Winemaker lunches with Beltrán Domecq, President of the Consejo Regulador de D.O. Jerez/Sherry. Sherry is undergoing a remarkable resurgence and is as popular in the trendiest of Britain’s cocktail bars as it is in the new Spanish restaurants, tapas bars and

Freddy Gray

Land of the Donald

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsangryamerica/media.mp3″ title=”Freddy Gray talks to Isabel Hardman about Donald Trump’s angry America”] Listen [/audioplayer]It was, in the end, the best possible night for Donald Trump. On Super Tuesday, 11 American states voted for Republican and Democratic presidential candidates. Trump won seven. That was enough to ensure he remains easily the frontrunner, but not enough

The debt monster

Just after last year’s general election, George Osborne delivered a budget that he hailed as proof that his policies were working. ‘The British economy I report on today is fundamentally stronger than it was five years ago,’ he crowed, as he started to detail the record number of jobs created and a growth rate that

Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 5 March

If the daffs outside my window are anything to go by and the robin busily building its nest in the ivy, spring is almost here. And thanks to Private Cellar, we have the perfect wines with which to greet it. At great prices too, with up to £2 a bottle lopped off. Not only that,

Roger Alton

Two big hitters leave the crease

Two great men have just bowed out from their chosen trades and it is bloody sad. The New Zealand cricket captain Brendon McCullum and the journalist Hugh McIlvanney might not seem to have much in common but they both made the world a better, more joyful place. I sat up until the small hours a

Courchevel

The last time I stayed in Courchevel it was in a tatty roadside chalet a long way down the mountain. One detail sticks: pickled cockles piled high on a platter at the closing banquet, à la Fanny Cradock. That was more than a decade ago. This time, we were staying at 1,850 metres, which is another

What’s love got to do with it?

The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens

Lloyd Evans

Tragedy trumped by porn

Big fuss about Cleansed at the Dorfman. Talk of nauseous punters rushing for the gangways may have perversely delighted the show’s creators but I’m firmly with the exiteers. This is barely a play and more a thin, vicious pantomime with an Isis-video aesthetic. The minuscule plot follows Grace (Michelle Terry) as she visits a prison

Ticket to ride

The latest film from the Coen brothers is a comedy set during the ‘golden age’ of Hollywood and in some respects it is utterly delicious. George Clooney wears what is effectively a leather miniskirt throughout, which may not be ‘age-appropriate’, as they say, but is wholly pleasing. (I was personally delighted, I must confess.) And

Laura Freeman

Topsy-turvy

When Tom Birkin, hero of J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country, wakes from sleeping in the sun, it is to a vision: the vicar’s wife Alice Keach in a wide-brimmed straw hat, a rose tucked into the ribbon. ‘Her neck was uncovered to the bosom and, immediately, I was reminded of Botticelli —

Sex on legs

That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my

James Delingpole

Northern exposure | 3 March 2016

Some things I have learned about Iceland after watching six episodes of Trapped (BBC4, Saturdays). 1. They seem to feel much the same way towards the Danes as the Irish or the Scots do towards the English. 2. Some typical Icelandic first names: Andri, Ásgeir, Dagný, Hjörtur, Hrafn, Þórhildur. But even if you did Anglo-Saxon

Linked in

What makes the World Service so different from the rest of the BBC? I asked Mary Hockaday, the controller of the English-language service. And how does it justify the additional £289 million funding (spread over the next five years) which the Treasury granted it at the end of last year? Will that money, which could

Theo Hobson

The rite stuff

Religion remains a surprisingly popular subject for plays. It’s partly because there’s already a core of theatricality there, in the rituals, the dressing-up and the little shibboleths of piety. In one way or another, religion involves performing. And religion plays the role of Hogwarts in Harry Potter — an enclosed world, a game with rules.

Why ‘my’?

It used to be ‘Your M&S’. That was presumptuous enough. Now, when you drive past Earls Court exhibition hall, pathetically covered in plastic sheeting while being demolished to make way for a high–quality, mixed-tenure residential neighbourhood, the hoarding tells you you’re going past ‘My Earls Court’. You can read all about it on myearlscourt.com. No,

For their eyes only

In Competition No. 2937 you were invited to submit extracts from the diaries of the famous that their writers did not wish the world to see. Josh Ekroy impressed, lifting the lid on F.R. Leavis’s and C.P. Snow’s chummy trysts; Alan Millard wasn’t alone in outing God-botherer Richard Dawkins; and here’s a snippet from Sylvia

Communism kills

I went to Budapest last year and did the usual touristy things. I climbed up the hill to the fantasy castle walls in Buda. I took a boat ride. I went to the Turkish baths — edging cautiously into scalding hot water and then summoning up the courage to tip a bucket of cold water