Four of the best Spectator pieces I’ve ever read

One of the things that lockdown allows you to do is not just to read but to re-read. Obviously the smart thing to do is to say that you are ‘re-reading’ vast books you haven’t actually read (Gibbon, Macaulay etc). Easier, and often more enjoyable, is to re-read pieces you remember but haven’t read for a while. 

Recent days have given me a good opportunity for doing that, among much else. And perhaps I should say at the outset that the editor has not asked me to do this. I have been offered no bribes, dangled no promotions and offered not even one bottle of Pol Roger. But I simply say, with honesty, that when the mind roams over various subjects and memories of recent years, pieces in The Spectator do stand out.

And so one pleasure I have allowed myself in recent days is to re-read pieces from the magazine that I haven’t been able to forget. Indeed I have gone back over them to check that they are as good as I remember them being – they are – and allow myself the pleasure of reading them again. A pleasure which I now pass on to anyone who wants to follow.

This is a very select (and perhaps first) selection of Spectator articles. All from my own time writing for the magazine. And I give just four to start off with. All happen to have some, albeit glancing, relevance to the current situation.

The first is by our late colleague Clarissa Tan who died six years ago now. Clarissa was a wonderful writer, as she was a person: sparky, super-bright and uncommonly careful – as well as kind – in her judgments.