Society

Thursday

Alexander Larman

Is Stephen Fry the right choice to play Lady Bracknell?

Last year, the National Theatre staged The Importance of Being Earnest in a new production by Max Webster. It attracted mixed reviews from critics and audiences alike, who applauded its determination to do something new – to re-queer Wilde for a younger audience, if you like – but also dared to suggest that Ncuti Gatwa, who played Algernon Moncrieff, was not the most comfortable casting for Wilde’s protagonist. Still, Gatwa is a big name and pulled in the crowds, and so it was little surprise that, for the play’s inevitable West End transfer, similarly starry names had to be produced. The first was Olly Alexander, the pop singer and actor,

Douglas Murray

How to handle the Wagner problem

There are deep ructions across Europe, as in Britain. All come down to the same thing. The societies in question have decided to take in more people than they could ever absorb or integrate, and have done so at a rate that will ruin these societies financially as well as socially. It’s a little late for the occasional minister to talk about the fabric of the country being under ‘strain’, or the need for greater ‘social cohesion’. These things have been shot for years. What is interesting is not just what a mountain Wagner is for modern Germany, but how they deal with it The problem is that every counter

The Spectator

Letters: The case for recognising Palestine

State of emergency Sir: As someone who spent time undertaking research in Israel and Egypt, living for almost a year on Kibbutz Re’im, one of the communities attacked on 7 October 2023, I find myself in agreement with much of the description in your leading article ‘State of denial’ (26 July) – but not the conclusions. Many of us are aware that Israeli intelligence knew what was being planned for 7 October, but did nothing to prevent it. Why? The horrors that have happened since have played into the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters as they seek to create a Greater Israel, with no room left for a

Lara Brown

Why Generation Woke loves romantasy

When the willowy human Feyre meets the faerie Tamlin in A Court of Thorns and Roses (known as ACOTAR by fans), he is a ‘snarling gigantic beast with golden fur’. Drama ensues when Tamlin, with his ‘elf-like horns’ and ‘yellow fangs’, kidnaps Feyre. He keeps her in captivity, then claims her: turning up in her room at night and clamping his teeth down on to her neck against her will. Two hundred pages later, the pair finally have sex and Feyre marvels that while ‘his claws were out’ they are ‘devastatingly gentle on my hips as he slid down between my thighs and feasted on me’. She moans his name

Angus Colwell

Lunch with Thomas Straker, the chef the restaurant world loves to hate

‘It was a heavy week,’ sighs Thomas Straker, explaining why he recently ended up on a drip in New York. He’s been nicknamed Britain’s ‘bad boy chef’, and his fans love him. He owns two restaurants in Notting Hill and has 2.6 million Instagram followers: not far off Nigella. Another restaurant is coming in Manhattan, so he has been spending a lot of time there. ‘Post-service, out late, every night,’ he says. ‘So I was in Soho at 3 a.m. the day before I ran the London marathon… I got carried away’ Straker Industries has many divisions: he runs a YouTube channel, has a butter range and is about to

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Could Danny Kruger save the Conservatives?

I’ve seen signs of life in the Conservative party – unlikely I know, but true. I had thought it a dead thing, dripping its life-blood slowly into Reform. But ten days ago I saw on YouTube a speech that a Tory MP gave in the House of Commons and… I don’t know. I felt hope. The MP was Danny Kruger, member for East Wiltshire, and as it happens he’s a friend of mine. I’ll say straight away then that this is absolutely not an attempt to promote him as next leader, though the post-Kemi era does seem to be approaching fast. For one thing, Kruger is a middle-aged white Etonian,

Andrew Gimson

Varun Chandra: the most important adviser you’ve never heard of

The porousness of the Establishment, and its reluctance to advertise its activities, are illustrated by the career of Varun Chandra. At the age of 40, he sits as business adviser at the right hand of the Prime Minister, accompanied him to the meeting on Monday with Donald Trump at Turnberry, and is credited with playing an invaluable role in the recent trade talks in Washington. Before the general election, he used his innumerable high-level contacts to persuade business that Labour would be a better bet than the Conservatives. About himself he has preserved an almost immaculate discretion. He has no Wikipedia entry and is not in Who’s Who. Almost everyone

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

What it means to be English

How can you ever put your finger on the comfort, the joy, the absurdity, of being English? Not, perhaps, through some attempt at definition: but in a hundred moments linked by that invisible thread, Englishness. Such a moment occurred for me last Friday. The place was Kidderminster in Worcestershire, the occasion the re-opening of the heritage Severn Valley Railway to Bridgnorth in Shropshire, at the lovely station from which the line, formerly Great Western Railway (GWR) and closed by British Rail in the 1960s, runs. If scripture doesn’t specifically mention steam engines, they are implicit in the psalmist’s rapture Let’s not be sentimental about Kidderminster. Described by Pevsner as ‘uncommonly

Peter Jones

Is Trump playing the same game as Nero?

Last week, in his jovial Spectator piece about Donald Trump’s golf diplomacy, Patrick Kidd drew a comparison with the Roman emperor Nero, who adored chariot racing and was always deemed to have ‘won’, whether he crashed or not. He also raced a chariot drawn by four camels, but that was just the half of it. He was passionate about music, took lyre and singing lessons and kept his weight down with enemas and emetics. No one was allowed to leave while he performed. Women gave birth during his recitals, we are told, and people climbed out over the rear wall or shammed dead in order to be carried out. Whenever

Toby Young Toby Young

Make Trump Britain’s prime minister

When I was a young man, the claim that Britain was in danger of becoming the 51st state was a political slur mainly thrown about by the left, particularly those who objected to the presence of US military bases. But there was some anti-American sentiment on the right, too – Enoch Powell, for instance, had a dislike of America’s hostility to the Empire that dated back to his service in the second world war. I’m even guilty of some anti–American prejudice myself and wrote a memoir in which I tried to convey that my failure to take Manhattan in the mid-1990s was because I wasn’t willing to sell my soul

David Abulafia

The power of wax seals has never waned

In our electronic age it hardly comes as a surprise that Pat MacFadden’s Cabinet Office intends to do away with the use of seals on most official documents, such as grants of patents to inventors. Old-fashioned wax seals, hanging from the bottom of parchment documents, may be seen as cumbersome, but most sealings nowadays consist of an embossed impression on a thin wax wafer. I used to seal documents myself when I occupied the ancient office of ‘Registrary’ in my Cambridge college. Most memorable was the sale of land the college had owned in Rickmansworth since the 16th century – by now a muddy private road thought too costly to

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The Ashes just got spicy

You don’t have to look hard to find swaths of sports fans around the world who dislike England – England’s men’s teams that is. The women are a different matter. Now, surprise surprise, the Australians have come to the party. If they ever left. The trigger this time is Ben Stokes’s surly behaviour to the Indians at the end of the fourth Test when Washington Sundar and Ravi Jadeja chose to bat on to pick up their centuries, rather than march off for the draw that Stokes wanted. All that was left was sledging: ‘Fucking hell, Washi, get on with it,’ said Harry Brook, who never shuts up; ‘If you

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I calculate how much caviar to take?

Q. While on holiday in Corfu, we met a rather nice man who invited us to his house for dinner. The house turned out to be something of a palace. There were six of us around the table and a waitress came towards us. She had a tray with a bowl, sitting in a bed of ice, and a tin of caviar, with a mother-of-pearl teaspoon, surrounded by ice within that bowl. Caviar is my favourite food and I can remember every mouthful I have ever had – but I hardly ever have it. The waitress presented the bowl to me first. I didn’t want to be gauche and ask

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

The chef does not understand sandwiches: Raffles London at the OWO reviewed

I am mesmerised by the restaurants of Raffles London at the OWO (Old War Office) because war approaches and the Old War Office is now a stage set for food, floristry and linen. If this is civilisation – it isn’t really, but it thinks it is – who will protect it now? Will we even know if war has started – or care? It was a fine building when I first came – I have reviewed its chilly Mediterranean food, its manic Italian and its tepid French – and it still is. Grand hotels exist to suppress time. It is a preening Edwardian palace with crazed plinths, over-pliant staff and

Dot Wordsworth

Is it ‘off his own back’ or ‘off his own bat’?

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often it turns up in sporting contexts, considering it is a mangling of a metaphor from cricket, ‘off his own bat’. In Trollope’s novel from 1869, He Knew He Was Right, in which a brittle-sounding character is called Glascock (which I suspect is pronounced Glasgow), a lesser hero, Hugh Stanbury, asks an old servant of his

Catriona Olding

How not to behave at a London gentleman’s club

After a 5 a.m. start, I arrived at the departure gate in Nice airport to discover there was an air traffic control strike and my flight had been delayed by two hours. Annoyance gave way to relief when the board turned red and all later flights were cancelled. This was the week of the Spectator summer party and, because of work commitments and for reasons of economy, I was flying back at 5 p.m. the following day. I was packing a lot into those hours: on arrival a late lunch in Pimlico, where I was staying in a flat belonging to a friend, Kate, who was away; the party; a

Melissa Kite

Our B&B is the opposite of organic

‘You need a Wwoofer,’ said the guest as he luxuriated in the big armchair by the roaring fire in our sitting room. We looked at him blankly for a moment before I replied: ‘We have a woofer. Two woofers.’ And I nodded to the spaniels lying at our feet. ‘No, I’m talking about the Wwoof scheme,’ he said, a hint of his Welsh accent showing through. ‘World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. A Wwoofer is someone who comes to work for you for nothing in return for learning about organic principles.’ The big old house on the hill seduces them with her Georgian charm. She’s a flirt of a building

Luke McShane

Full English

Michael Adams took first place in a strongly contested English Championship, held in Kenilworth in July. The veteran elite grandmaster defeated Nikita Vitiugov in a tense playoff, after the two tied for first place with five wins and two draws each. Vitiugov, a former Russian champion, now lives in the UK and has represented England since 2023. Adams won a crisp attacking game against 16-year-old Shreyas Royal, who already became a grandmaster last year. Michael Adams-Shreyas RoyalEnglish Championship, Kenilworth, July 2025 White to play, position after 29…g7-g6 1 e4 e5 2 Nf3 Nf6 3 Nxe5 d6 4 Nf3 Nxe4 5 d4 d5 6 Bd3 Bf5 7 O-O Be7 8 Re1

Robin Oakley

How John Egan has stayed in the saddle

Pop stars rock on nowadays into their seventies. And jockeys too – despite the physical dexterity and instant-decision-making required – are lasting longer. Jimmy Quinn and Franny Norton only quit the saddle in their mid-fifties; Joe Fanning is still going strong at 55. On a sweltering Ascot day recently I enjoyed a chat with John Egan, who was handling the heat better than much younger rivals and is still in demand at 56. Remembering past successes, including the Irish 2000 Guineas on Indian Haven, July Cups on Les Arcs and Passive Pursuit and an Ebor Handicap on 100-1 shot Mudawin, I asked if there was a particular race he still