Society

A flash of the future, over the holidays, that felt like a flash of the past. It happened on Christmas Day, just after lunch, when my father-in-law gave me a virtual reality headset. It looks like a pair of ski goggles. They used to be fearsomely expensive, but recently some bright spark came up with the idea of replacing the screen and the computing power with a slot into which you pop your phone. All you need now is a frame and a couple of lenses, and you’re off into a virtual world. You can get a cardboard one for a tenner. They’re amazing. We all had a go. First,

‘Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers,’ remarked the journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, ‘is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.’ He was right, but the fault lies not with the newspapers. The problem arises from the idea of news. ‘News’ cannot see so much of what’s happening that matters. As the new year begins I’d ask you to consider a small example: the most visible change to the built environment in Britain. I’ve yet to read anything you could call a ‘splash’ on the subject, but gradually, steadily, and in time no doubt universally, we’re

How to celebrate the centenary of the Russian revolutions of 1917? Modern Russians are deeply divided over the legacy of that tumultuous year. Russia’s few remaining liberals remember that the overthrow of the tsar in February 1917 ushered in a flowering of the artistic avant-garde, a brief period of feminism, liberal values and democracy. Putin supporters, on the other hand, have been convinced by years of state television propaganda that popular revolutions are by definition dangerous and anarchic, and usually orchestrated by dark outside forces. Whether in Maidan Square in Kiev in 2013, Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011 or Palace Square in Petrograd in 1917, the very idea of

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 January 1917: The war has been crowded with romantic adventures by sea and land in every part of the world, but perhaps nothing is more sensational, more reminiscent of blue lights and the accents of warning and suspense from the orchestra, than the murder of the monk Rasputin in Petrograd… Whether those who took his life did so on the grounds of private revenge or of patriotism remains to be seen. In any case, we agree with Reuter’s correspondent that the disappearance of this sinister figure is a subject for congratulation for all true friends of Russia.