On 15th June 1919 John ALCOCK (34) and Arthur BROWN (37) completed the first non-stop transatlantic flight when they crash-landed near CLIFDEN, COUNTY GALWAY (46/9) in a VICKERS VIMY (23/25), having taken off from ST JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND (10/13) the previous day. First prize Judith Cookson, Prestbury, Glos Runners-up Martina Fabian, Bourne End, Bucks; Alan Peevers, Manchester
I was talking to a large Silicon Valley video-conferencing firm the other day. ‘Just for interest,’ I asked, ‘what would it cost to provide your service to 65 million people?’ The reason I asked is simple. I don’t understand why it is fine for government to spend £60 billion on a railway or £20 billion on an airport, but not, say, £300 million a year providing the whole country with first-rate video-calling technology. The argument for the UK seems especially compelling. An English-speaking country situated on the Greenwich meridian is likely to gain disproportionate business advantage from the widespread adoption of video–conferencing. If we were to negotiate a collective price
Our offer from Corney & Barrow is absolutely jam-packed this week so I trust you’ll forgive me if I get straight to the nitty-gritty. Regular readers will recall the fabled Brett-Smith Indulgence, whereby C&B’s MD, Adam Brett-Smith, knocks a few extra quid off a case for anyone buying two dozen bottles or more (on top of the existing Speccie discount). Well, we’ve decided to streamline things and apply said discount to just the one case. How’s that for good news? The following prices are therefore as tasty as the wines they apply to. 2018 La Muse de Cabestany Chardonnay/Viognier (1) is an undemanding light and fruity white from the excellent
We were in a club, discussing Norman Stone, recently departed, over a meal that he would have enjoyed. Norman divided opinions. This manifested itself in his obituaries. Professor Sir Richard Evans summed up for the prosecution. He cited Norman’s failure to build on his early scholarly promise and his chronic neglect of academic duties. He concluded by quoting an old adversary of Norman’s, who described him as ‘amoral’. This is a difficult verdict to refute. Yet it is only part of the picture. He won the enduring affection of most of his best pupils, despite — or because of — his unorthodox methods. In Norman’s Cambridge days, an earnest young
Is there any invention as ancient and as fundamental as soap? Traced to Babylonian civilisation around 2,800 bc (handy for scrubbing down after all that gardening), it almost certainly goes back millennia further than that. It is mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah and by 1550 bc the Egyptians were marketing it as a medicinal aid for sores and other skin ailments. There was a soap factory buried in Pompeii — although the product is believed to have been used more for washing clothes because visitors to Roman bath houses preferred to scrub themselves with olive oil. By 1192 soap had become one of Britain’s earliest mass-manufactured goods — though
As I get older I find the idea of wanting to be in a couple more and more bizarre. I’m not talking about sex — which anyway often becomes less frequent after years of familiarity — or marrying for financial security. No, I’m puzzled about people’s obsession with getting a permanent companion. There are all sorts of websites and advice columns purported to help us reach this goal. I used to receive ‘taster’ emails from Rori Raye, a bubbly American lady with blonde curls, author of How to Have the Relationship You Want. She offered to show us, for a fee, how to be the woman men always fell for.
‘Life pours back in.’ A score of us, listening to Charlie Burrell at the Knepp estate ten days ago, will always remember his words: so palpably true. We could see just what he meant as he took us through his work ‘re-wilding’ the estate in West Sussex where he and his wife, Isabella Tree, live at Knepp Castle. The family have owned and farmed these 3,500 acres for more than two centuries. Sir Charles, 10th Baronet, and Isabella are giving their all to this brave project, for which they have become pioneers, leaders, opinion–formers and evangelists. And the religion is spreading. Everyone in the world of environmentalism talks about re-wilding
How surprising to read one former Tesco chief, 82-year-old Lord MacLaurin, badmouthing another, Sir Terry Leahy. The surprise is because both were titans of their trade and Leahy has always been seen as Ian MacLaurin’s protégé: it was MacLaurin who took Tesco to the top of the UK supermarket league in the mid-1990s, then Leahy who quadrupled its sales, profits and share price between 1997 and 2011 to make it the monster we know. But Leahy also took Tesco into a disastrous US grocery venture and — according to MacLaurin, talking to the Sunday Times — started ‘the rot’ that brought the company low by 2014, leaving the blame to
In Competition No. 3105 you were invited to submit a fragment of commentary on the Women’s World Cup delivered by a figure from the world of fact or fiction, dead or alive. From Joseph Houlihan’s William McGonagall, who chronicles the Scottish team’s defeat at the boots of the Auld Enemy, to R.M. Goddard’s Samuel Beckett — ‘Miss Reilly, a fugue of female feet at frolic, dribbles delicately past the centre forward and passes to the sweeper, then pauses to spit decorously on the greensward…’ — it was a cracking entry. J. Seery and W.J. Webster earn honourable mentions, those printed below take £25 apiece, and woman of the match, D.A.
The Government’s commission on how to make new houses more beautiful – yes, that one – is set to publish its first report in the next few weeks. It no longer has a permanent Chair and it will be reporting to a different administration and a new prime minister, but its advice will be crucially important. In order to get new homes built in areas where opposition is most vociferous – which tend to be the places new homes are needed most – the house-building industry needs to change. Monocultural housing estates, once labelled the “turkey twizzlers of architecture” by the philosopher Alain de Botton, are simply not what the public wants.
This year the publishers Faber & Faber celebrate their 90th birthday, and to honour the occasion I’m joined by Toby Faber, the founder’s grandson and the author of a new history of the company called Faber & Faber: The Untold Story. Most corporate histories are boring, but this one — told largely through the correspondence of that company’s astonishing cast of literary luminaries — is anything but. Toby talks about the company’s rackety start as a publisher of medical textbooks; about T.S. Eliot and the genesis of Cats; and Kazuo Ishiguro’s most mortifying moment.
Christopher Booker has died at the age of 81. In 2014, he wrote in The Spectator about how the first world war inspired the EU, and why its supporters won’t tell you: Among the millions of words which will be expended over the next four years on the first world war, very few will be devoted to explaining one of its greatest legacies of all, the effects of which continue to dominate our politics to this day. One of the best-kept secrets of the European Union is that the core idea which gave rise to it owed its genesis not to the second world war, as is generally supposed, but
Who on earth would want to be an academic in 2019? This is the question anyone with a modicum of intellectual curiosity must now be asking themselves. When a PhD student left Cambridge University last week on the grounds that a non-white lecturer ‘had repeatedly read out the n-word during class discussions’, I harboured a vain hope that the university might express support for the lecturer on the grounds that they were reading from a text and not using their own words. That would have been the logical stance to take. Instead, we are seeing a capitulation to the accusations of students. Yesterday, it was revealed that the University is
Given the level of threats that they face, and the bizarre life they often lead, it’s no surprise that MPs have a higher preponderance of mental health problems than the general public. A study published this week in the British Medical Journal found that 34 per cent of parliamentarians had the symptoms of a common mental disorder, with the rate in the general public at a lower 26 per cent. What’s more striking about the research, which surveyed nearly a quarter of MPs, is that so many of them – 77 per cent – had any idea that there was a dedicated mental health service in Parliament. The Parliamentary Health
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when Joe Biden was the man to beat in the race to win the Democratic nomination. Name recognition, likability, electability, or his eight years of service as Barack Obama’s lieutenant, meant that Biden’s poll numbers were sky-high and the former vice president was the indisputable frontrunner. A poll last month put Biden on 38 per cent – 19 percentage points higher than his nearest competitor. “Middle Class Joe”, it seemed, had the nomination in the bag. But then the Democratic debates took place. And Biden’s desperate slump began. Since the June 27 Democratic hustings in Florida, Biden has been losing support. After the debate, Biden’s numbers
I’m bored with writing about politicians and Brexit so this is an article about genitals instead. Feel free to make your own jokes about the sentence above, but I promise what follows is not funny. You could not, as the old phrase goes, make it up. Most of us, I think, like to see ourselves as tolerant and open-minded. Live and let live is the prevailing social attitude of our times. For all the division and acrimony in political debate and online, British society is, by international and historical standards, strikingly liberal and tolerant. This is a good thing. People should not face abuse or exclusion or hostility because of
About this time of year, two sorts of pictures end up doing the rounds on social media. The first is roughly along the lines of this one, which is being shared from the BBC website: Why are Britain's roadsides blooming? https://t.co/dEgvSH5ine — BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) July 2, 2019 This sounds like a lovely, positive story of a council doing its bit for nature by sowing wild flowers on its verges. More on that shortly. The second involves someone heartbroken that their beautiful roadside verge has been mown by their local council: Council accidentally bulldozes roadside nature reserve: https://t.co/MaT9Y5fpDt — BirdGuides (@BirdGuides) April 16, 2019 Most people might think that
News that the Church of England has published social media guidelines promoting ‘truth, kindness, welcome, inspiration and togetherness’ sounds welcome. Surely we all want to live in a world which live and let lives, where kindness and tolerance are key, and everybody has the same human rights, regardless of gender, race, colour, sexuality, nationality, or religion? Well yes, but hold on. These values are only meaningful if everyone adheres to them. Often the acrimony on social media stems from fighting about very real social ills: anti-Semitism in the Labour party and the Islamic world; racism; sexism; homophobia; the allowing of violent psychopaths access to their victims, whether they’re male rapists in
Is a ‘woman’ an adult human female or a person who identifies as such? This is the question I asked Nicola Sturgeon at the United Nations earlier this year. But, oddly, she wouldn’t answer it. Instead the first minister of Scotland explained that, as ‘an ardent, passionate feminist,’ women’s concerns about how gender self-ID laws might harm them are ‘misplaced.’ The day after Sturgeon’s UN address, in a leaked online conversation, three female SNP MSPs complained that Sturgeon’s remarks proved that she was ‘out of step’ with the party. ‘FFS [for f***’s sake]’ one wrote, sharing a tweet from ‘Engender’ (a self-described feminist policy and advocacy group) whose director had
If you were ever in any doubt that so-called anti-fascists are, in fact, fascists, take a look at this picture of my friend and colleague Andy Ngo: In the ER. pic.twitter.com/spe5N4nzVl — Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) June 29, 2019 A freelance journalist with bylines in Spectator USA and the National Review, Andy was covering an Antifa protest in his home town of Portland yesterday when he was set upon by a group of about 20 masked thugs. You can watch a video of the assault here: First skirmish I’ve seen. Didn’t see how this started, but @MrAndyNgo got roughed up. pic.twitter.com/hDkfQchRhG — Jim Ryan (@Jimryan015) June 29, 2019 The reason