It was a scene evoking the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony. The evening sunshine was caressing the verdant woods at the top of a hill. It was only a low hill; there seemed nothing especial about this sweet rural scene. But just below the woods, the upper slopes contain some of the most valuable
Six years ago, on Good Friday, the journalist Melanie Reid was thrown off her horse while on a cross-country ride in Stirlingshire where she lives. The accident broke her neck and back and left her tetraplegic, paralysed from the armpits downwards. On Easter Sunday on Radio 3 she’s Michael Berkeley’s guest on Private Passions, a
In many ways a satnav is a miraculous device. A network of US military satellites more than 10,000 miles above the surface of the Earth, each broadcasting a signal with little more power than a 100-watt light bulb, allows a device in your satnav or mobile phone to triangulate your location on the ground to
Which is better, British TV drama or American? A couple of years ago, merely asking the question would have had the hipsters chortling into their obscure US box sets — and even now a strange cultural cringe seems to persist. Nonetheless, I’d suggest, British television drama these days really is in the midst of an
Looking across the wide Neva from Vasilyevsky Island, the Palace Embankment shimmers in the river, suspended between water and sky. Raised on a marsh by violence and sheer force of will, there are few cities more impossible, and more beautiful, than St Petersburg. It’s worth going for the view alone, and you should — now,
One of these days I will probably see a production of Don Giovanni set in a research station in the Antarctic. English Touring Opera, ambitious and valiant, haven’t gone that far yet. But Lloyd Wood’s new staging, part of an ETO threesome now hopping round the country, still makes the eyebrows shoot up. This time
The big hitter this week is, of course, Batman v Superman, but if you want to learn something new, and meet characters that’ll stay with you long after, well, get yourself to Court. This is an Indian courtroom drama in which the wheels of justice grind so slowly you’ll want to scream, and now I
For decades — even before it had its name, which sounds thrilling, as words with an X in them tend to — I’ve been a Brexiter. I even mistrusted the Common Market, as we called the mild-mannered Dr Jekyll before it showed us the deformed, power-crazed face of the EU’s Mr Hyde. The adored MP
Miss Atomic Bomb celebrates the sub-culture that grew up around nuclear tests in 1950s America. The citizens of Nevada would throw parties and stage barbecues to coincide with the latest nuclear detonation in the desert. This musical has a lot going for it. The melodies are strong, and well sung. The high-kicking chorus lines are
We’ve all done it: been overcome by a sudden sense of hard-upness at the moment when the collection plate comes round at the end of a cathedral service. We fumble in our pockets, feel a £1 coin and a £10 note, and decide that the £1 coin will do. This is a cathedral, for goodness sake,
This is perhaps not the best moment in history to extol migrants from the developing world or Eastern Europe, but the fact remains that without them my life, and I suspect the life of many other people in the West, would be much poorer and more constricted than it is. A migrant is not just
From ‘Common-sense and the command of the air’, The Spectator, 25 March 1916: The Air Service will be the great fighting Service, the Service which will seal the fate of nations. We say this, not because the Air Service is a novelty, but because of a plain, undeniable physical fact — the universality of the air…
I do not know if it has officially been measured, but my guess is that Christine Shawcroft, a member of Labour’s National Executive Committee, has an IQ of somewhere in the region of six. This would put her, in the global hierarchy of intelligence, directly between one of those Activia yoghurts women eat to relieve
New York ‘Does this mean we have to vote for Hillary?’ asked my wife. It was early morning 16 March, and the queen consort of the Democratic party had seemingly sewn up the presidential nomination — a coronation promised years ago by her king but thus far denied by unruly subjects. As I scanned
No one does political violence quite like the Tories. The fall of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 unleashed a cycle of reprisals that lasted until David Cameron became leader in 2005. During that time, Tories specialised in factionalism: wets vs dries, Europhiles vs Eurosceptics, modernisers vs traditionalists. Cameron’s great achievement was to unite the party in
I used to enjoy ‘giving feedback’ in the glory years when nobody wanted it. Now, upon completing a routine transaction, the customer is bombarded with breathless demands for response. The neurotic corporate catchphrase is ‘How was it for you?’ The world is now in feedback frenzy. Companies endlessly prod us for our views so they
Does a near-death experience make you a better person? This is something I’ve been thinking about on and off since my pulmonary embolism. Initially, it hadn’t occurred to me that a PE was a big deal. But the research that I’ve done since suggests that these things aren’t unserious. My seen-it-all ex-army GP, for example,
Fifty years have passed since the death of my father, Evelyn Waugh. His remains, together with those of his wife Laura and daughter Margaret, are buried within a ha-ha which is now collapsing into the churchyard of St Peter and Paul, Combe Florey. My nephew, Alexander, and I hope that these graves could be incorporated
In every gathering, someone — often me — calls for a show of hands on Brexit. And I have to report that, in the varied circles in which I move, ‘leave’ may have the best tunes but isn’t winning the argument. At a Mayfair fundraiser for a Jewish charity, the crowd of mostly thirty-to-fortysomething men
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence by a man I shall call Anton. We’d gone, my husband and I, for a 20-week scan at our local hospital. Anton was our designated sonographer; we arrived in his room bright-eyed and anxious, as
