Society

Thursday

Joan Collins

Joan Collins: The politics of Christmas trees

To say that the past nine months have been tough is like saying a hurricane felt like a spring shower. For many people it must have been utter hell, particularly those who own hospitality businesses. I simply cannot imagine how they could plan and manage ahead when our government refused to give anyone a clue whether either of the lockdowns was genuinely going to end. It all reminds me of the silly children’s game Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which players attempt to creep up behind ‘Grandmother’. If she turns and catches them moving, they must return to the beginning. We always seem to be returning to the beginning. Lockdown all over

Mick Fleetwood

Mick Fleetwood: Why Peter Green was the greatest guitarist

In a normal week, I would jam with local musicians, but that stopped in March and we musicians miss the road and our crews. There have been some good things to come out of this awful year, though. A new world was revealed to me on TikTok, an app that lets people upload clips of themselves lip-syncing or dancing. And out of TikTok came Nathan Apodaca, a man from Idaho who recorded a video of himself skateboarding to work while sipping from a bottle of cranberry juice and singing along to our song ‘Dreams’. More than 70 million people have watched Nathan’s video, and we have since spoken and he

Jonathan Biss

Jonathan Biss: The sadness and euphoria of playing to an empty room

My November was bookended by two characteristic displays of grace. I ushered it in by falling on all fours while out for a run, skinning both knees and demolishing my pride; masked and bleeding is not a good look, even (especially?) on Halloween. I bid the month farewell by leaving my house in a torrential rainstorm — having consulted the weather report — wearing socks and shoes with holes in them, and carrying no umbrella. It seems I’ve been distracted. In my… well, not defence, but perhaps something adjacent to it, it was a hell of a month. After a seeming eternity of nothing, everything happened in November. I played

Quentin Letts

Quentin Letts: The unstoppable rise of June Sarpong

Eton’s free-speech rumpus must surely become a David Hare play, Goodbye Mr Had-Yer-Chips, starring Jeremy Irons as the headmaster and Maxine Peake as the staff member who sneaks on the English beak teaching non-feminist critical thought. Like most attempts at suppression, Eton’s will be counter-productive. Teenage boys adore political martyrdom. Eton’s top man, Simon Henderson, looks a very poor version of John Rae but he may have done us a favour by turning a generation of Etonians into tingling sceptics of wokery. In this season for miracles, the rise of June Sarpong continues: she has been made a trustee of the Donmar Warehouse, that London theatre attended by City snoots

Ian Rankin

I Live Here Now: a short story by Ian Rankin

Ever since his daughter’s death, John Bates had all but given up. Eunice had been 17, bubbly and surrounded by friends, keen to leave school behind to study history at university. She’d been a passionate cook and hockey player, not yet ready for a steady boyfriend, and loved absolutely by both her parents. But then one night she had consumed almost an entire bottle of vodka before climbing on to a parapet and leaping into a river swollen by over a week of near-constant rain. John and his wife Emily had sat numbed for days on end as relatives and neighbours passed through the house, offering solace and paying tribute.

Lawrence Osborne

How Korean cinema mastered the art of horror

There is a moment in the Jung brothers’ 2007 ghost film, Epitaph, when a young doctor in wartime Korea realises that the wife he adores does not have a shadow. He is entertaining her with a shadow puppet show in their home when he notices the aberration. ‘Walk to me,’ he says as he waves a naked light bulb in front of her. She had been a visiting medical student in Japan a year earlier and, unbeknownst to him, had died in an accident. It’s a moment that perfectly illustrates the psychological subtlety and brilliant scene-making of Korean film. Epitaph is about a group of young doctors working in a

Nick Cave

Why AI will never write a great song

Two years ago, the songwriter Nick Cave told his fans that he’d speak to them directly — not through an interviewer. ‘This will be between you and me,’ he wrote. The letters he has received and the answers he has given are collected online in The Red Hand Files. Here is a selection of the best. Considering human imagination the last piece of wilderness, do you think AI will ever be able to write a good song?Peter, Ljubljana, Slovenia Dear Peter, In Yuval Noah Harari’s brilliant book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, he writes that Artificial Intelligence, with its limitless potential and connectedness, will ultimately render many humans redundant

Tom Holland

The anxieties that long ago shadowed Christmas are back

Christmas has been given the green light by the government this year less because it marks the birth of Christ than because retailers and the hospitality industry desperately need it to go ahead. Other feast days in the Christian calendar still belong to the church. Christmas is the feast day that a fundamentally secular nation has made its own. It’s become part of the festive tradition for Christians to mourn this as the ultimate triumph of commercialisation and self-indulgence. But it might comfort them this year to know that their anxiety has deep roots. Folk memories of Oliver Cromwell banning Christmas — however distorted they may be — remain sufficiently

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘People confuse sadness with darkness’: the complicated world of Mary Gaitskill

In the early 1990s, the American novelist Mary Gaitskill suffered an abrupt awakening. ‘I lived in New York, I didn’t have a television, I didn’t listen to the radio. I didn’t even read magazines or newspapers very often. I was really too preoccupied with my own existence, which was hand to mouth a lot of the time,’ she says. ‘But when I was a little better off, I began to pay attention. I did get a TV. I did listen to the news a lot. And I was just like, holy shit. What a weird fucking world.’ What particularly astonished her, she says, is how central the fashion industry had

Thomas Fink

A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize

Sir Roger Penrose was at school when he realised that his mind worked in an unusual way. ‘I thought, maybe when I go to university, I’ll find people who think like me,’ he tells me, at the beginning of what was to be a fascinating conversation, stretching long into the afternoon. ‘But it wasn’t like that at all. When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’ Just after we spoke, in early December, Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should think a little differently. But, as he explained it to me,

Richard Dawkins

The insidious attacks on scientific truth

What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense and its truths may even offend it. Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists too can make mistakes

Anthony Horowitz

Building Sizewell C would be a nuclear-sized disaster

I love Suffolk. This Christmas I will be there with my family and we’ll almost certainly walk up the coast, joining dog-walkers, bird-watchers, hikers and even swimmers in one of the most beautiful and unspoiled parts of the UK. The secret of Suffolk is its relative inaccessibility. No major motorway connects it and once you arrive you’re committed to a sprawling network of country lanes that twist through heathland and grazing marsh, mudflats and reedbeds. Minsmere, a nature reserve that’s home to 6,000 wildlife species, is among its glories. The nightjar, the woodlark, the Dartford warbler and the silver-studded butterfly are just some of the rare species found there. At

Susan Hill Susan Hill

The wonderful ghosts of Christmas past

The past shifts about like clouds, now dense, now parting for a memory to shine out, perhaps randomly, but bright as the sun. Here is the Sheffield Christmas when I was four and slept in Great-Aunt Florence’s room, on an eiderdown beside her bed, in the terraced house that smelled of coal smoke — the Christmas of worrying about how dirty Santa must get, going up and down the sooty chimneys. Home was Scarborough: the bracing sea air and howling gales where I missed the coal dust smell, though it brought back the cough I had had since nearly dying of whooping cough, aged two — the cough that has

Matt Ridley

Why mRNA vaccines could revolutionise medicine

Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machines called ribosomes where they are translated into proteins. ‘Sydney got most of the credit, but I don’t mind,’ Watson sighed last week when I asked him about it. They had solved a puzzle that had held up genetics for almost a decade. The short-lived copies came to be called messenger RNAs — mRNAs – and suddenly they now promise a spectacular revolution in medicine. The first Covid-19 vaccine given

Christopher Howse

2020 Christmas quiz

Out of the ordinary In 2020:1. The town of Asbestos voted to change its name to Val-des-Sources. In which country does it lie?2. What town between Dunstable and Milton Keynes was hit by four earthquakes in a fortnight?3. In a heatwave in America where was a temperature of 130˚F recorded? 4. In April a volcano erupted on an island in the caldera of its predecessor, which exploded in 1883 and went by what name?5. Which Mediterranean island nation gave each of its citizens €100 to spend in bars?6. Chad began to send 75,000 cattle as repayment of a debt of $100 million to which other African country? 7. In February,

The Spectator

2485: Triplets – solution

Each of the unclued lights includes the same letter three times in succession. First prize Tom Rollinson, Borehamwood, HertsRunners-up Lynn Gilchrist, Willoughby, NSW, Australia; Brian Midgley, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire

Robin Oakley

The horse with a taste for human flesh

Greville Starkey’s great victories as a jockey included the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on Star Appeal at 119-1. In 1978 he won the Derby and Irish Derby on Shirley Heights and the Oaks and Irish Oaks on Fair Salinia. He was also known for his unerring mimicry of a Jack Russell terrier’s bark, a distinction that once had an airliner’s departure delayed while stewards sought in vain the animal aboard. When he deployed his trick during a celebratory dinner at Quaglino’s, trainer Henry Cecil wrapped a napkin round Starkey’s neck and led him yapping out of the restaurant on all fours. In races he used it to disconcert his

Stephen Daisley Stephen Daisley

Scotland’s drug problem is a national scandal

You have seen the chart and it is grim. A list of European countries ranked by annual drugs deaths, with Scotland at the top and a long red bar beside it. Scotland recorded 1,264 deaths from drug misuse in 2019, more than twice the number of HIV-related deaths in Somalia and more than double the death toll from terrorism in Iraq in the same year. Two-thirds of deaths were among Scots aged 35 to 54 but there was also an increase among the 15-to-24 demographic. More than 90 per cent involved multiple-drug cocktails, with ‘Street Valium’ cited in two-thirds of cases. The fake benzodiazepines can be bought for 50p a

Wednesday

Harry Mount

Why is the National Trust so determined to lecture its members?

Can the National Trust dumb down any further? Its latest crazed venture, the Colonial Countryside project, is ‘a child-led history and writing project’, working with 100 primary school pupils, 16 historians and ten commissioned writers. The aim is to ensure that ‘robustly researched stories of empire are communicated’. So here comes another highly politicised scheme – in the light of its disastrous LGBTQ campaign, forcing volunteers to wear rainbow badges, and outing the owner of one of its great houses, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cremer, who bequeathed Felbrigg Hall to the Trust. As Charles Moore writes in his Telegraph column this week, the experts on the colonial project are of a predictable,

Kate Andrews Kate Andrews

Podcast special: can Britain really become ‘the Saudi Arabia of wind power’?

27 min listen

Last month the government released its ten point plan for what it dubs ‘The Green Industrial Revolution’. At the top of the list was offshore wind, with a pledge to produce enough power for every home by 2030. Offshore wind currently constitutes over 50 per cent of the renewables in the UK, with costs coming down considerably over recent years. But does offshore wind have its limits? Is it always a good deal for the consumer? And how far can it realistically advance us on our road to Net Zero by 2050? With Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Minister for Business, Energy and Clean Growth; Benj Sykes, VP for UK Offshore at