Society

Thursday

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Glorious Clarets in Large Formats, Ideal for Christmas

You will have read, I’m sure, our Low Life correspondent’s account of the recent Spectator claret and clay pigeon shoot cruise along the Thames, which we ran in association with our mates at Private Cellar. Jeremy Clarke described it beautifully and, in short, we had an absolute hoot. Forty or so readers joined us as we tootled down the river in stately style aboard The Will, a century-old Thames sailing barge. We moored up just past the Thames Barrier, radioed Wapping police station for permission to fire and proceeded to blast clay pigeons out of the sky – some more successfully than others. Amongst other weaponry, we used a pump

The Spectator

Answers to Spot the Shakespearean Character quiz

1. Oberon (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hamlet (Hamlet) 3. Cordelia (King Lear) 4. Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing) 5. Orsino (Twelfth Night) 6. Julius Caesar (Julius Caesar) 7. Titania (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 8. Hippolyta (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

John Sentamu

Archbishop’s Notebook

I’m not surprised that black people are still eight times more likely than white people to be stopped and searched by the police, despite the less frequent use of those powers. It happened to me regularly in the 1990s. One rainy night I was driving through the City of London in one of the cars loaned to bishops for their work, when a constable flagged me down. It was winter and a scarf covered my dog collar. I asked him repeatedly why I had been stopped. He replied repeatedly and with increasing agitation, ‘Just open the boot.’ Then he asked me what I did. When I said, ‘I’m the Bishop

Christopher Caldwell

Why are Americans so unhinged about Christmas?

The most obnoxious advert on American television this Christmas season features a thirtyish man telling his wife he ‘got us a little something’ at a holiday sale. He leads her out to the colossal driveway of their newly built modernist mansion to show her just what: two brand-new GMC pickup trucks, a boxy, blue one for him and an effeminate, red one for her. Anyone who has watched more than an hour of American TV over the past decade will know what comes next. She happens to like the blue ‘man’s’ one, leaving him to admit meekly that, well, he’s fond of red. In the world of American corporate copy-writers,

The Spectator

The Spectator’s original verdict

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë,  reviewed 18 December 1847 An attempt to give novelty and interest to fiction, by resorting to those singular ‘characters’ that used to exist everywhere… the incidents and persons are too coarse and disagreeable to be attractive, the very best being improbable, with a moral taint about them, and the villainy not leading to results sufficient to justify the elaborate pains taken in depicting it. Bleak House by Charles Dickens, reviewed 24 September 1853 Bleak House is chargeable with not simply faults, but absolute want of construction. A novelist may invent an extravagant or an uninteresting plot — may fail to balance his masses, to distribute

William Boyd

Writer’s Notebook

Just back from a few days in Rome — the perfect small metropolis for ‘street-haunting’, as Cyril Connolly described his love of strolling through cities. I first went to Rome in 1976, aiming to interview — for my university magazine — three of the writers who lived there or thereabouts at the time. I duly wrote to Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal and Muriel Spark. All of them politely turned me down but I went anyway and have revisited the city many times. In fact, in the way life sometimes arranges these things, I later met all three writers and even came to know Burgess and Vidal a bit. As reading

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

My foolproof recipe for a better world

It is always a pleasure to watch Paris burning. On the surface a civilised country, but scrape a little deeper and France is revealed as a nation of kind of faux-Arabs (aside from that rapidly growing proportion who are actual Arabs): easily incensed into an incandescent toddler fury at real or imagined iniquities, things not working out quite the way that they had hoped. An inchoate existential rage, hilariously — in this case — exhibited by people wearing those absurd yellow fluorescent jackets. They have latterly realised that their leader, Emmanuel Macron, is a smarmy, loquacious, incompetent idiot with strange sexual tendencies. We knew that all along. We told you

Prue Leith

My Christmas nightmares

Christmas in our family seems to guarantee tears and tantrums as well as jingle bells and jollity. Indeed, in my childhood, ‘feeling Christmassy’ meant feeling thoroughly overwrought or bad tempered, the antithesis of the ‘Christmas Spirit’. I think my father invented it when my mother, who was a terrible cook, spent all day making marmalade to give as Christmas presents and was then beside herself with anger when she burnt the lot. My earliest Christmas disaster was my first attempt at cake icing. I’d proudly come home from school with a Christmas cake. It was covered with smooth royal icing on which I’d painted the Three Kings — but I’d

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The end of the era show

It may be the end of the year but it’s also the end of some major sporting eras. Alastair Cook signed off amid sun-drenched glory and a tsunami of affection. And surprise, surprise, it has liberated Joe Root to make a team in his own image, playing with brio and bravery. Roger Federer may be capable of one last burst of incandescent brilliance but not much more than that. Meanwhile, the implacable giants of football and cricket, Germany and Australia, have been brought crashing down to earth. We should relish the schadenfreude now, because renewal will follow quickly, and a new-look young German football outfit looks to be already on

Christina Sulbaran

The Maduro diet

I am writing from my home, Barquisimeto, the fourth largest city in Venezuela, which was, not so long ago, the most prosperous country in Latin America. In the past four years, things here have changed — utterly. I am writing to explain how much has changed, and how quickly. I moved here as a girl in 1973 from San Cristobal in the Tachira region of the Andes, and I went on to become a university professor. My story was made possible by my country’s success. My mother, a widow who ironed laundry for a living, managed to send my three sisters and me to university. Like most Venezuelans bringing up

Emanuele Moscato

The meaning of time

The physicists Marc Warner and Emanuele Moscato met Professor Carlo Rovelli, author of the bestselling Seven Brief Lessons on Physics. Together they questioned him about his latest book, The Order of Time, which has been compared with the work of Stephen Hawking. Their conversation explains and explores the meaning of time, as it is and as we perceive it to be.   A theory of time   A practical reader of your book The Order of Time might wonder why we care about time, when it seems so obvious and so universal. Why would a physicist pay any attention to it? Nobody is obliged to be informed about the reality

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Should we all write ‘feminist’ stocking fillers?

I arrived at Waterloo, half an hour before my train departed. Needing to buy a birthday card, I popped into Oliver Bonas, a shop which sells ‘lifestyle gifts’. I came across marble cheeseboards and gin-and-tonic scented candles. If you are looking for a lemon juicer shaped like a cactus, you will find one in Oliver Bonas. The shop also sells ‘gift books’. Most are aimed at women and quite a few have the word ‘feminist’ in their title. There is one called Vajournal: An Interactive Diary for Feminists. It invites the reader to engage with ‘thought-provoking activities’ and describe their ‘worst and best sexual experiences’ as well as any instances

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

All I want for Christmas is a City time machine

Are smartphones fuelling a pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression? That’s the question parents will wrestle with this Christmas as their offspring clamour for the latest Samsung or Huawei. And the answer seems to be yes: these must-have accessories are corroding the nature of human interaction for the next generation — but the young can’t live without them, so we’d better get used to it. And that gives rise to an even trickier yuletide dilemma: what of the previous generation? Is there a digital device that’s safe to pop under the tree for an elderly relative? The solution, I suggest, is the iPad. Not the iPad Pro — with more

The Spectator

Christmas quiz – the answers

You don’t say 1. President Donald Trump, in a tweet 2. Donald Tusk, the President of the European Council, in an Instagram 3. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary 4. Boris Johnson on the niqab 5. Sarah, Duchess of York, on the engagement of her daughter Eugenie 6. Serena Williams, to the referee, on being docked points during the American Open final 7. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, in China 8. President Emmanuel Macron of France 9. Danny Dyer 10. Rt Revd Michael Curry, preaching at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex Flick books 1. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 2. All Quiet on the Western Front 3.

Lucy Vickery

O come let us adore zhim

In Competition No. 3078 you were invited to submit a politically correct Christmas carol.   One of Donald Trump’s election pledges was to end ‘the war on Christmas’, and he has given the electorate the presidential nod to say ‘Merry Christmas’ again instead of the more inclusive ‘Happy holidays’.   But was this ‘war’ pointless and misguided in the first place? As Adam Gopnik points out in the New Yorker, Christmas ‘is, at its roots, the very model of a pagan-secular–synthetic festival as much as it is a religious one — just the kind, in fact, that the imaginary anti-Christmas forces are supposed to favour…’ and concludes: ‘he war on

Jonathan Ray Jonathan Ray

Wine Club 15 December

It’s the music that gets me, the bloody piped music. Christmas carols on an endless loop. It’s a wretched constant, whether one’s in the supermarket, the station, the airport or even — and, good grief, is nowhere safe? — the doctor’s surgery, as I’ve just discovered. ‘How can you stand this?’ I asked the girl in the Santa hat at the supermarket checkout. ‘How can I stand what?’ she replied, glassy-eyed. ‘The music, the bloody music!’ I exclaimed. ‘Oh, that,’ she said with a sigh. ‘I don’t hear it any more. It’s been on for six weeks now and I’ve become immune.’ We looked at each other sadly. I know,

Dot Wordsworth

Word of the year: Shouty

‘Remind me what incel means again,’ said my husband. There was no point, since he’d forgotten twice already. I suspected a psychological barrier to learning. Incel (a label for people unhappy at being involuntarily celibate) was a runner-up for Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year, won by toxic. But to me the word that captures the flavour of Britain this year is shouty. It identifies a trait that people dislike yet are given to. It belongs to an informal register (like not wearing a tie). Protesters are literally shouty, and metaphorically so are capital letters, some films and even aromatic food. There was sympathy, I read in the Guardian, for

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

The most underpriced present you can buy

During the second Gulf war, simply out of curiosity, I found myself visiting the website of a giant American mercenary organisation. At the top of its home page I was surprised to see the words ‘online shop’. Thinking I could perhaps order an airstrike, or a fleet of Humvees to collect my daughters from school, I clicked on the link. All that was on offer was a range of brightly coloured beach towels displaying the company’s logo — a giant bear’s pawprint next to the word ‘Blackwater’. Needless to say, I bought two: one in orange and one in pink. In all honesty, I don’t think my wife was entirely

Bruce Anderson

Either fish or fowl

It is enough to drive a fellow to the bottle. I am not given to agnosticism. My view is that if the evidence seems to sustain a conclusion, weigh it and arrive at one. On Brexit, I find that impossible. Most of my friends have no problem. From Remoaners to rejoicers, they all deal in certainties. I cannot emulate them. My intellect seems to have turned into a cushion, bearing the imprint of the last person I spoke to. I refuse to believe that the Bank of England has turned into the equivalent of an M.R. James ghost story, a delightful way of giving everyone a good scare on a

Christopher Howse

Christmas quiz | 13 December 2018

You don’t say In 2018, who said: 1. ‘I have the absolute power to PARDON myself, but why should I do that when I have done nothing wrong?’ 2. ‘A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.’ 3. ‘Frankly, Russia should go away and should shut up.’ 4. ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.’ 5. ‘I always say that the river flows well to its destiny because of the guidance of a solid rock.’ 6. ‘There are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me?’ 7. ‘My wife