Two 16-year-old schoolgirls from a sink estate in Bradford find fun and happiness by shacking up with a middle-aged married man — if you’ve never seen it, it sounds like the worst movie ever made. Yet Rita, Sue and Bob Too was a delight, one of the best British films of the 1980s, and this
What is ‘far-right’? With the progress of Marine Le Pen to France’s presidential run-off, the term has been liberally used — as it has been over recent years across the West. Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, and the Sweden Democrats are all said to be far-right, to name but three. The fact that
The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s ‘Belief and Beyond Belief’ season is drawing to a close, without making it in any degree clearer what it was supposed to be about. Many major works have been played, and the season will end with Eschenbach conducting Beethoven’s Ninth. But then any series of concerts with a pretentious name ends
It’s not the free movement of people I spend my nights fretting about; it’s the free movement of pests. It’s the thuggy Spanish bluebells invading our woodland and killing our own delicate flowers; it’s the Asian caterpillars devastating our box hedges; it’s the black-winged killer ladybirds from North America wiping out our spotted red ones
I awoke the other morning to hear Diane Abbott’s brains leaking out of her ears and all over the carpet during an interview with LBC’s excellent Nick Ferrari. You will need a mop and a bucket very sharpish, I thought to myself, as she gabbled on, the hole beneath her feet growing larger with every
Whenever I want to travel back in time to my 1970s childhood, all I need is a glass of Lucozade. One sip of the electric orange nectar and there I am in the magical era of Chopper bikes, space hoppers and clackers (which they banned because they were dangerous, apparently), of the Clangers, Animal Magic
Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion. Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the
She was a foundling in her own family, shunted to adoptive parents for two years, then to the edge of China, to a fishing village on the East China Sea, and to a furious, alcoholic grandfather and a grandmother sold at 12 into marriage for some pottage, and never given a name. Is that colourful
In Competition No. 2996 you were invited to submit an acrostic sonnet in which the first letters of each line spell AT THE SPECTATOR. You weren’t obliged to make the theme of your sonnet this magazine and its contributors but many of you did, to great effect. (The tone was mainly though not universally affectionate.)
It’s reassuring that of Ed Docx’s three admirably eclectic, though sometimes uneven, previous novels, Let Go My Hand most resembles the capacious, Booker long-listed Self-Help. Like that book, this is fiction with heft and moral nuance; a novel that gets its hands dirty in the soiled laundry basket of family secrets and resentments. As such,
What will we do when there are no longer caches of letters to piece together and decipher; only vague memories of myriad emails? We will be like butterfly hunters flailing around with our nets, hoping to catch some rare specimen with glittering wings among the detritus of daily exchanges. The letters of Ida Nettleship, first
A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he wrote a column on ‘Manly Health and Training’ for the New York Atlas. His pieces were published under a pseudonym, Mose Velsor, and have only recently been connected to Whitman by a graduate student at
The history of modern medicine is a roll call of brilliant minds making breakthrough discoveries. We rarely hear about the losers, but Wendy Moore has chosen to write the extraordinary story of a massive medical fiasco: the craze for mesmerism which gripped Victorian London in 1838. The practice of using the ancient technique of hypnosis
In an early chapter of All Grown Up, the narrator Andrea says to her therapist: ‘Why is being single the only thing people think of when they think of me? I’m other things, too.’ ‘Tell me who you are, then,’ says the therapist. And so Andrea tells her that she’s a woman, a New Yorker,
On 27 May 1939, the German liner St Louis docked in Havana with 937 passengers on board: all but a handful of them were Jews in flight from the Third Reich. After a dismal farrago of diplomatic obstruction, bare-faced corruption among local officials and the incitement by Nazi propaganda of anti-Semitic prejudice ‘even’ (as Leonardo
Exceptions aside, Spectator readers are not consumers of luxury for luxury’s sake. They are unassuming keepers of style, guardians of distinction – and firm of belief that any claim to sophistication demands a renunciation of bling. In fact, I can only assume that this is being read by a pious confederacy of cashmere-clad clones. You
When my old friend – a lifelong Labour supporter – told me he was voting Tory at the election, I posted a message on Twitter: That was that, I thought. But then the replies started piling in. One of the first responses came from someone who thought my friend would regret his decision if he
Theresa May has kicked off the Tory general election campaign with a remarkably punchy statement in Downing Street. She accused the European Commission of trying to interfere in the UK general election. She said that the hardening of the Commission’s negotiating stance and the leaks of recent days ‘had been deliberately timed to affect the
I have just been to Buckingham Palace for an audience with Her Majesty The Queen to mark the dissolution of this Parliament. The 2015 Parliament is now at an end, and in 36 days the country will elect a new Government and choose the next Prime Minister. The choice you now face is all about
Ukip is a party searching for a purpose. In recent weeks, its focus has been on Islam. Now, it has hit on a new ruse to try and win over voters: going after Britain’s foreign aid budget. The party has said it will scrap the 0.7 per cent spending commitment put into law by David