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Alexandra Shulman is the former Editor-In-Chief of British Vogue. On the podcast, she talks to Olivia and Lara about her mother Drusilla Beyfus’s etiquette tips, wining and dining as a journalist in the 80s, and how doughnuts never lasted long at Vogue. Presented by Lara Prendergast and Olivia Potts.
From the moment the popular American fried chicken vendor Chick-fil-A opened its inaugural UK branch in Reading, gay rights activists started mobbing it with complaints and calls for it to close. Why? Well according to Reading Pride who led the campaign, the food outlet’s charitable donations to ‘anti-LGBT’ organisations such as The Fellowship of Christian Athletes and, God forbid, The Salvation Army, was indicative of their unforgivable bigotry. The Fellowship of Christian Athletes are opposed to same-sex relationships and marriage equality, and the campaigners say several charities Chick-fil-A gives money to are hostile to LGBT rights. And so, cancelled they must be. Chick-fil-A’s first batch of specialty chicken and waffles had barely been dunked
So after Tom Bradby’s documentary on Harry and Meghan: An African Journey last night, what are people talking about? The mines issue, 22 years after Diana walked through a minefield in Angola? Violence against women and girls in South Africa, as evident in the training that girls get to help them fend off attacks, which the couple saw in Cape Town? Conservation of elephants, Harry’s big thing? The couple – first together, then Harry singly – went to an astonishing succession of African states one after another – was it really necessary to pack them all into a single visit? – and visited a worthy project in each of them.
Back in 2016, thousands of Brits thought they’d struck gold. Word was spreading through WhatsApp and Facebook groups about an exciting new crypto-currency called OneCoin. It was rumoured to be the next Bitcoin – that strange digital currency that had been shooting up in value and minting millionaires. OneCoin’s founder, a Bulgarian-German businesswoman called Dr Ruja Ignatova had impeccable credentials – a degree from Oxford and a stint at the respected McKinsey’s. OneCoin, Dr Ruja said, was the ‘Bitcoin Killer’, heralding a financial revolution and, if you got in early, a unique new investment opportunity. Driven on by the crypto hype, OneCoin reached 175 countries around the world, and over €4bn was poured in from hopeful investors. We estimate as much as €100m was invested between
For the latest competition you were invited to step into the shoes of well-known poets and give their reflections on the Apollo 11 moon landing, 50 years on. Cath Nichols’s enjoyable entry looked back on the lot of the Apollo wives through Wendy Cope’s acerbic eye. Nick MacKinnon was also an accomplished Cope impersonator: Bloody men are like bloody rockets, you wait nearly five billion years and as soon as one feels up your craters another Apollo appears… Rufus Rutherford, channelling Basho, submitted a charming haiku. And Robert Schechter, as Ogden Nash, also kept it brief: To the marvellous event that happened fifty years ago I dedicate this ode.
Student politics these days is frequently self-parodying. The Gandhi Must Fall campaign at Manchester university is a perfect case study. Manchester city council has approved plans for a nine-foot statue of Mahatma Gandhi outside Manchester Cathedral. The idea is to promote peace in the wake of the horrific Manchester Arena attack. Who could possibly object to this? Sara Khan, Manchester students’ union’s ‘liberation and access officer’, that’s who. She is leading the campaign against the statue on the grounds that the Indian independence leader made racist comments about Africans. This follows the Rhodes Must Fall campaign at Oxford, which unsuccessfully tried to have a statue of the long-dead colonialist Cecil
The inner workings of the European Union can often seem like a chummy club to outside observers – a place where EU bureaucrats, well-enumerated MEPs and Brussels-based journalists work together and fraternise behind closed doors. That clubby atmosphere certainly seemed to be on display today at Jean-Claude Juncker’s final European Council press conference in Brussels, before he stands down as President of the European Commission. During the press conference, as Juncker gave a short speech to the assembled journalists in French, and spoke of his pride defending Europe, the Commission official began to choke up with emotion. At which point the assembled press lobby responded by bursting into a spontaneous round
Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the Prime Minister, thinks that there is no ‘better book than Thucydides as training for politics’. But what does he ‘teach’? His ‘lessons’ are legion. Herewith some possibilities. In his history of the war between Athens and Sparta (430-404 bc), in which he briefly participated, smart one-liners leap off the page: ‘Humans are dominated by three motives: honour, fear and advantage’; ‘Identity of interests is the surest bond between states and individuals’; ‘Men consider what is pleasant to be honourable and what is advantageous, just’; and so on. Typically of a Greek, Thucydides distinguished sharply between thought and action. Describing a ferocious civil war, he reflected that
Bad sport Sir: At last a respected member of the shooting community has popped his head above the parapet. Patrick Galbraith has had the courage to express the view that many of us from the ‘bygone sporting era’ hold, but have either been too afraid of the commercial consequences, or too idle, to go public (‘Dangerous game’, 12 October). The shooting fraternity has done an awful job of educating newcomers about what constitutes a great day out. It has allowed quantity to prevail over quality. It has failed to ensure that appreciation of the ‘craic’ and the environment are an essential element of the experience. Like all activities, when you do
New York A strange thing happened to me here in the Bagel last week. Having read the recent review of a biography of Susan Sontag in these here pages, my plan was to compare her with another feminist, Simone de Beauvoir (I have just finished an opus about Beauvoir, Paris and the Left Bank après la guerre). My money was on Simone, an extremely promiscuous and beautiful woman who was the first to raise the feminine flag against men’s oppression of the fairer sex. Beauvoir’s Second Sex, published in 1949, made her lots and lots of enemies, but it also established her as the number one female icon of
Catriona and I had agreed that a terrace for smoking, eating, drinking and painting was a necessity rather than a luxury, blow the expense. One of the photographs of an Airbnb just above my price range showed an elegant round table with two romantic champagne flutes and an uninterrupted terrace view of a ridiculous sunset over the Ligurian sea and the coast of Italy. The faintly aphrodisiac image was a mug punter’s eyeful and I greedily tapped the button committing me to three nights at Sandrine’s Airbnb apartment, perched in the heart of Menton old town. Free parking was to be had next to the cemetery of the Old Château,
Q. I sing soprano in a small church choir, ten to 12 singers. The woman I am placed next to sings all of her high notes horribly flat, and I find it challenging to stay in tune myself. I have thought of moving but the choir is so small that such a manoeuvre would be pointed and in any case another soprano has beaten me to that strategy. My husband says the problem can be addressed only by the new choir director (who so far has done nothing) and I must remain silent. Your thoughts? — C.E., California A. Why not put an earplug in only one ear? Or find
I’m just back from Beijing, where I’ve been playing in the Hua Yuan Cup, an invitational tournament for the eight top-ranked women’s teams in the world. It’s a wonderful event, with generous prize money, and I got lucky: a member of the England team, Gillian Fawcett, couldn’t come, so I subbed. To say it was intense is to put it mildly. At one point, after our match against the Netherlands, I mentioned to the formidable Nicola Smith that I’d lent one of the Dutch women my scarf as she was cold. Nicola looked at me aghast: ‘You mustn’t do that — she’s the enemy!’ She went on to tell
The sandwich restaurant Pret A Manger is accused of harbouring centrists. Those are words I never thought I would type, but these are mad days. A Corbyn supporter called Aaron Bastani, the author of a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism — or, as wags call it, Luxury Space Robot Communism — has accused Rory Stewart of being unfit to be mayor of London because he likes Pret A Manger. It is, in Bastani’s mind, a sandwich-themed agent of evil, indicating a deeper evil which may or may not have something to do with wizards. I did not know that Pret A Manger’s smoked salmon sandwiches (they are quite good,
In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said that the Scottish government should ‘face up to the situation they are in and double down on recruitment efforts’. I think she just meant double. Double down is a phrase from blackjack, an American casino card game resembling pontoon. It entails a player doubling his stake in return for only one more card from the
Home Brexit teetered from uncertainty to uncertainty. Parliament had been summoned to sit on Saturday 19 October to debate what Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, had brought back from a European Union summit. He had held talks before the week began with Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach of Ireland, at Thornton Manor in the Wirral, from which optimistic noises emerged. Margaret Atwood, 79, from Ottawa, and Bernardine Evaristo, 60, from Eltham, shared the Booker Prize. The Queen wore the George IV diadem at the State Opening of Parliament instead of the heavy Imperial State Crown. Among 26 Bills set out in the Queen’s Speech were seven relating to Brexit, one of
White to play, Black to win. Shirov-Caruana from the Isle of Man. Caruana threatens 53… d1=Q 54.Qxd1 Qxb2 mate. Shirov resigned, rather than try 53.Bf7-b3 to block the b-file. What finishing touch had he foreseen for Caruana? Difficulty: Moderate. Answers via email to victoria@spectator.-co.uk by Tuesday 22 October. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 Rd7 Last week’s winner Richard Booth, Cheltenham, Glos
‘Poor indoor air quality hampers cognitive performance significantly’, concluded a recent study in the IZA (Institute of Labour Economics). Of course, ‘fresh air is good for you’ fits squarely in the category of things you knew already, but the research was specifically about chess: ‘An increase in the indoor concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) by 10 µg/m3 increases a player’s probability of making an erroneous move by 26.3 per cent.’ Intriguingly, the effect seems most pronounced when players are in time pressure. By my reckoning, that makes it pretty easy to induce mild stultification: burning a few incense sticks ought to do it. It’s scarcely credible now, but
19 October marks a milestone (hinted at by 19/26/20) for a person whose real forenames are given by 1A (three words). The other unclued lights (including two of two words, one being a toponym) suggest the titles of four of his works while the puzzle’s title suggests the title of a fifth. His real surname is clued without definition and must be shaded. Across 10 Old characters bash around poor boxer (5) 11 Lass that Victor cuddled regularly once (6) 12 Bill spent time with dandy (7) 14 Less advanced babes swimming in sinks (4) 17 Fieldwork soldiers distrust (7) 22 Beetle bisected by our fancy woman (5) 23
The start of term at Oxford University is bittersweet for the close-knit Morrisseys; we have just ‘lost’ three offspring to their undergraduate studies. Dropping them off at their colleges (Wadham, Christ Church and Keble, with another Morrissey at All Souls), my husband Richard and I felt a little wistful as well as proud. Every year we observe the striking diversity of the students in every sense bar one: they all seem very clever. Oxford is getting something right — broadening accessibility by contextualising offers, while unashamedly sticking to high standards. This is helping it maintain its crown as Britain’s highest-ranked university, one of four in the global top ten (the