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One of the first articles I wrote for The Spectator back in 2011 described the explosive celebration of Bonfire Night in Lewes, the ancient county town of East Sussex where I then lived. Today, such is the relentless march of purse-lipped Wokedom, it is necessary – in writing about this eccentric folk festival – to defend its very existence as well. The simple survival of ‘Bonfire’ (as it is known to Lewesians) every 5 November is in fact something of a miracle in our painfully politically correct age. In its contemporary form it originated in the 1840s, when the first of the town’s seven Bonfire Societies was founded to ritually

As the S-Bahn tram slid along Bernauer Straße, through its windows I could see tourists posing for photos beside the remains of the Berlin Wall. Everyone fixates on the border that cut through West and East Berlin. We forget that Berlin itself was deep in the GDR and that hundreds of kilometres to the west another border ran down the entire seam of West and East Germany. Observation Post Alpha, the West’s most important military observation post on that border, still stands today as a memorial to the folly of geopolitical games. It was erected to overlook the so-called Fulda Gap, an area of land deemed strategically vital by the

Economy fliers everywhere, rejoice! After a long stint of what can only be described as tight-fisted meanness, British Airways and other short-haul carriers including Virgin Atlantic have started to compete on service again. The trolley-dolly is officially back. Now, once you are (semi) comfortably seated in economy and cruising at altitude, you will be offered tea or coffee and maybe even a biscuit. Airlines have long competed in a race to the bottom on price but are undergoing something of a volte face. This new customer service strategy is driven by competition from the state-subsidised airlines in Asia and the Gulf. This can only be good news for those of us

Now that the clocks have gone back and the evenings draw in, those of us lucky enough to own a log burner start thinking about cranking it up. One of the few benefits of returning to GMT, as far as I’m concerned, is the chance to get primal – and have a real fire. Yet, as sure as eggs are eggs, this is also the time of year the media trots out scare stories about the supposed perils of wood stoves. For example, articles have recently appeared in several papers about a report commissioned by the climate charity Global Action Plan and Hertfordshire County Council, which claims that wood-burning stoves

You saw Homicide: Life on the Street, right? You know, that gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore. What? Ah, no, you’re thinking of The Wire, that other gritty TV police drama set in Baltimore, the one with Idris Elba and Dominic West. Homicide predates The Wire and was filmed largely around Fells Point and along Baltimore’s historic waterfront. The former City Recreation Pier, which stood in for the police department, is now a swanky hotel, the Sagamore Pendry Baltimore, in whose comfortable embrace I have just wallowed. Baltimore doesn’t have a great reputation. Whenever I tell American friends I’ve been there they affect horror and ask what on earth I was thinking. Couldn’t I have gone to Boston, New

Hungary, the country of my birth, takes a lot of flak these days – and with good reason. How nauseating that the nation which suffered Soviet oppression for nearly half a century – and whose 1956 Revolution was so savagely crushed by the Soviet army – now cosies up to a Russian president who reveres Stalin and bemoans the dissolution of the USSR. The maverick Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, once his country’s outspoken champion of freedom, is emphatically not on the side of Ukraine in its existential fight against Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Cheap Russian oil and gas are what interest him now… But hard as I find it to