Society

Thursday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

‘Come on: cancel me’

‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was filled with people from Laura Dern to the girls in Little House on the Prairie. And it always seemed a bit of a joke. I never really imagined that was on the cards for me. And I really haven’t done a lot of the things that you’re supposed to do to stay famous. ‘I haven’t published anything in ten years. I haven’t tried to write that novel that’s going to give critical acclaim or a prize or two — which I’ve never won. And I seem to be continually controversial

Joanna Rossiter Joanna Rossiter

Home truths | 9 May 2019

As any parent of young children will tell you, toddler groups exist as much for the adults as for the kids, and my local meet-up is no exception. We knock back coffee and compete to see who has had the least sleep while the children run riot on trikes. The small talk always winds its way round to nursery: which ones are good, which ones are near work, how much they charge per hour. You’d be forgiven for wondering why any of us chose to have children, such is the zeal with which we plot our escape. ‘They just installed CCTV,’ enthused one mother to me recently. ‘So I’ll be

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Are you a Tweedy or a Trainer?

‘Too tweedy? Goodness gracious me!’ Rory Stewart sounded startled. A contender for the Tory leadership, he was being interviewed by the BBC’s Paddy O’Connell last Sunday morning on Radio 4’s Broadcasting House. O’Connell asked the MP for Penrith and the Border how he responded to the criticism that ‘the Conservative party is too tweedy’. A short discussion of the relationship between 21st-century Toryism and tweed followed, during which Stewart revealed that in his rural constituency ‘quite a lot of us wear some tweed’. Only ‘some’ tweed, mind you: Stewart sensed he was on tricky ground here. Leadership candidates in all parties get used to being asked if they’ve ever smoked

The Spectator

How to fight Bolshevism

From 10 May 1919: The heart of the country is always for moderation. Nothing could show this more plainly than the recent by-elections. It was felt that the Prime Minister had been given too clean a sheet of paper to write his policy on, and that it would be good for him to feel that the country had criticism to offer, and was, moreover, able to put on the curb. But this balancing process was not, and never is, a violent swoop towards pulling down everything that exists. There was certainly nothing revolutionary in it.  

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

An evening with Glenmorangie

We had quite a coup the other day when Dr Bill Lumsden, Director of Distilling at Glenmorangie (and also, incidentally, Ardbeg), chose the Spectator boardroom in which to launch Glenmo’s majestic new release, the Grand Vintage 1991. Apart from a handful of drinks journalists the night before, those Speccie readers lucky enough and swift enough to have grabbed a ticket were the first in the world to sample this extraordinary whisky. Dr Bill, as he’s fondly known by one and all, is one of the leading figures of the Scotch whisky industry and was named Master Distiller/Master Blender of the Year by Whisky Magazine’s Icons of Whisky Awards in 2016

Lucy Vickery

The full English

In Competition No. 3097 you were invited to submit a poem about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet.   The line-up was mostly predictable — from Chesterton, so-called ‘prophet of Brexit’, through Larkin, Betjeman, Brooke, Housman and, of course, Kipling. But it was an American, Ogden Nash, whose pen portrait of us prompted me to set this challenge:   Let us pause to consider the English Who when they pause to consider themselves they get all reticently thrilled and tinglish, Because every Englishman is convinced of one thing, viz: That to be an Englishman is to belong to the most exclusive club there is…   The winners, in

Lee Langley

A corpse in waiting

Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous hero, a soldier in the Spanish civil war. The book won major prizes and transformed Cercas from a respected Spanish novelist into an international literary figure. Eighteen years on, he returns to the war with his new novel, Lord of All the Dead. This time his theme is the nature of heroism itself, interwoven with a more personal quest: a reluctant picking over the bones of his great-uncle Manuel Mena, a hero of the Franco era who became an embarrassment to his family as the wheel of history turned. It’s

Wednesday

Sam Leith Sam Leith

The Books Podcast: Bret Easton Ellis on coming out as Patrick Bateman

In this week’s books podcast I’m joined by Bret Easton Ellis. The author of Less Than Zero, American Psycho and Imperial Bedrooms is here to talk about his first nonfiction book White, and the savage critical response to it. We discuss censorious millennials, the fascination of actors, his problem with David Foster Wallace, ‘coming out’ as Patrick Bateman – and his own personal Ed Balls Day, when he posted what he thought was a text message ordering drugs to Twitter.

The Spectator

Full transcript: Douglas Murray in conversation with Roger Scruton

What does it mean to be a conservative? Last night, The Spectator brought together Douglas Murray and Roger Scruton to discuss that question. Here is the full transcript of their conversation: Douglas Murray: Some months ago, The Spectator said to me that they would like me to do an event and who would I like to do it with. And I said I’m very used to doing events with my enemies and spend rather too much time with them and would like to spend the evening with a friend. And they said: anyone in particular? And I said first choice, Roger Scruton. And a lot of things have happened since

Mary Wakefield Mary Wakefield

Jean Vanier’s world of love and kindness

Jean Vanier has died at the age of 90. In 2017, the founder of L’Arche spoke to The Spectator‘s Mary Wakefield about how a visit to an ‘idiot’ asylum inspired him: Some of the time, most of the time, it’s tricky to believe in God. There’s just too much that’s sad — and behind it all, the ceaseless chomping of predators. Then sometimes the mist lifts and just for a moment you can see why the saints insist that everything’s OK. There’s a documentary out now, Summer in the Forest, that for a while cleared the mist for me and made sense of faith. It tells the stories of a

Tuesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Censored in the City: Dave Rubin on the American liberal orthodoxy

Censored in the City is a new podcast taking you through a round-up of news, politics, and culture in New York City, Washington DC, and abroad, focusing on stories and issues beyond the 24/7 news cycle. Each week, I am joined by a guest to discuss the long-term, underlying issues behind the headlines.  In this episode, I’m joined by Dave Rubin: libertarian commentator, the creator and host of The Rubin Report. We talk about the Intellectual Dark Web, the state of liberalism in modern America, and ask why the Left has fetishised Islam.

Monday

James Kirkup James Kirkup

Women are being silenced from speaking about transgender rights

I have written several times here about the fear that some women have about expressing their opinions and concerns about the trans-rights agenda. I know of women in many walks of life, some of them prominent public figures, who think that current and potential policies intended to make life easier for trans women (that is, people born male who know identify themselves as women) will have the effect of diminishing women’s safety, dignity and legal standing. Among their concerns are the gradual erosion of laws that allow companies and organisations to restrict access to particular services and spaces according to sex (which is a biological fact). They fear that ‘gender’

Madeleine Kearns

The ruling on Caster Semenya is a common sense compromise

Was the Caster Semenya ruling fair? It’s an emotional case that has sparked debate across the world. Born with a disorder of sex development (DSD), the South African runner was raised female and has never thought of herself as anything else. But on Wednesday, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled to uphold the International Association of Athletics Federation’s (IAAF) regulations for female athletes with DSDs. In order to compete in the women’s category, the court decided, Semenya must take drugs to lower her testosterone levels. Whichever way you look it – and there are a lot of ways of looking at it – it’s a no-win situation. Sports

Mary Dejevsky

Damian Green’s social care model breaches a sacred tenet of the NHS – and a good thing, too

The central proposal in Damian Green’s recent paper on social care is that care provision should be treated like pensions. In ‘Fixing the care crisis’, he argues that everyone should be entitled to ‘a decent standard of care’ funded by the state – in the same way as they are entitled to a state pension – but could then choose to ‘top up’ from their own resources to add what he calls ‘bells and whistles’. The benefits from such a system, as he sees it – and I agree – could be manifold. It should eliminate the patent injustice, according to which cancer care is fully state-funded while dementia care

Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Romanticising Northern Ireland’s history is a deadly mistake

For those of us who grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, there is a pungent but negative sense of time travel around New IRA statements. The New IRA spokesman is a ‘T. O’Neill’ — which, you might notice, is just a consonant and some bad blood away from the old Provisional IRA spokesman ‘P. O’Neill’ — and his sonorous words, like those of his predecessor, are carefully crafted to mask a sad, nasty reality. The most recent one, in the aftermath of the New IRA murder of the journalist Lyra McKee, offered an ‘apology’ which stated that ‘in the course of attacking the enemy Lyra McKee was tragically

Sunday

Laurence Wilkinson

Israel Folau and the right to freedom of expression

Australian rugby player Israel Folau’s disciplinary hearing, which is set to determine whether he will lose his AUS$4m mega-contract for an Instagram post he published in April, will drag into a second day after eight hours of legal argument failed to settle the issue on Saturday. It is expected that the three-person tribunal will decide at some point next week whether Folau’s comments on social media were grievous enough to end his rugby career. Folau has serious rugby credentials; he is the joint-third highest try scorer of all time for Australia, and has won the Australian Rugby ‘Player of the Year’ award a record three times in 2014, 2015 and

Karl Williams

Roger Scruton’s treatment shows the moral cowardice of the Tories 

In his vindication of Sir Roger Scruton, Douglas Murray quite rightly refers to the affair as ‘a biopsy of a society’. It was also a biopsy of the Conservative party in particular, and a dispiriting one at that. It is notable that while a good slice of the conservative commentariat came to Scruton’s defence, Conservative MPs were conspicuously silent, except for those who rushed to excoriate Scruton. This response was indicative of the gap between the party in the country and the Parliamentary Conservative Party, which has seen an attenuation of the conservative instinct and — as has been argued in these pages — seems bereft of ideas or vision.

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: how it feels to be a half-eaten gorgonzola

Your latest challenge was to submit a short story that ends ‘I feel like a half-eaten gorgonzola’. Thanks to reader Mark O’Connor, who suggested that this observation which, in case you were wondering, comes from a letter written by Lytton Strachey to his elder brother James on 27 July 1908, might be incorporated into a challenge. It turned out to be a tricky one: despite valiant — and often ingenious — attempts to incorporate the given phrase without the edges showing, there was an inevitable element of stiltedness and contrivance. Medusa and Emile Zola enjoyed starring roles in many entries — some more successful than others. Honourable mentions go to

Saturday

Hugh Campbell

The truth about Noah Carl

My great friend Dr Noah Carl joins a group of distinguished academics removed from their posts this spring. But while Jordan Peterson (visiting fellowship rescinded by Cambridge) and Sir Roger Scruton (sacked as a commission chair by James Brokenshire) can arguably hold their own and get on with their lives, Noah – an early-career Junior Research Fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge – has been fired from his only job, made unemployed by the braying mob. When Noah first told me of his appointment in Oxford’s Turf Tavern last year, it was a great cause for celebration. A Junior Research Fellowship is, after all, something of a holy grail for

Friday

Daniel DePetris

The United Nations and the fracturing of Western unity

The United Nations Security Council was designed to, in a phrase, keep the peace. Life didn’t have to be brutish and short; if the great powers got into a room, they could wield their collective might and solve any problem.  The Security Council’s top priority—“the maintenance of international peace and security”—would prevent a third Great War from killing millions of people. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a utopian fantasy land. It turns out that the Security Council, populated by fifteen different countries with their own set of interests, can be just as dog-eat-dog as the world in which it represents. And in the age of Donald Trump, the top UN body