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Yesterday

Angus Colwell

Domino’s has fallen

There are few culinary experiences like the first bite of a Domino’s pizza. The finest N25 caviar or a perfectly seared lobe of foie gras surely can’t compare to the ecstasy that comes from that mouth-cutting cornmeal that they sprinkle all over the base, or that sweet, cloying ‘cheese’, or those tart, dancing cups of pepperoni. In these moments, resistance is futile. It’s not a question of whether this is the best takeaway pizza there is, or even the best food there is. It’s a question of whether this is the best thing there is. Of course, we know how it ends. Fifteen minutes later, caked in sweat, parched, filling yourself up

Alexander Larman

The death of the bloke film

If you saw the Edgar Wright–Stephen King adaptation The Running Man in the cinema last weekend, with Glen Powell as the eponymous fugitive in a dystopian future, then you were one of the relatively few. The film has flopped at the box office, with audiences resistant to Powell’s charms and Wright’s visual pizzazz, and in a tricky year for King adaptations. It’s not been helped by some idiotic remarks the author made at the time of Charlie Kirk’s assassination; there will probably be fewer big-budget films based on his work in the future. Yet The Running Man’s failure also suggests that there is a wider issue at hand, and that

Graham Boynton

The best American band you’ve never heard of

Earlier this month, the best rock band to have come out of America in decades played London’s Roundhouse in front of 3,000 very excited British fans, all of whom sang along to every song the Alabamans played. It was the best gig I’ve been to in years, mainly because the Red Clay Strays are musically so damned good and that smart British audience got everything they were offering. It had that rowdy, joyful atmosphere that Faces gigs did in the early 1970s. Stay with me, Spectator readers. While our collective, more sophisticated, tastes may lean towards Wagner, Chopin and Mozart and, at a push, Miles and Monk, there will always

Tuesday

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

My murderous, malfunctioning Aga

People always divine themselves through material goods: hence the obsession with the Aga, recently detailed by my friend Rachel Johnson in these pages. Rachel loves her Aga – well, her Agas, she has two – because it needs to be defended from bourgeois socialists who don’t have Agas: they just want them, because self-deception is the defining characteristic of the bourgeois socialist. Me, I hate mine. I used to love her because she made me feel upper middle-class, which I’m not, and now I know I’m not, and I’m glad I’m not, please take her. Of course, Agas are class signifiers. An Aga is like the last vestige of the

Druin Burch

Pens have gone extinct

Gone are the days when I always had a pen in my pocket. Gone are the days when I needed a pen to go to work. The NHS does not now always require a pen, and the NHS is not quick to abandon old technology. Ten years ago I worked in a hospital where a ward computer still had a floppy disk drive. Older readers will understand – and wince – when I say it wasn’t three-and-a-half inches but five-and-a-quarter. I remember writing my university finals with a pen, and I remember it because I recall how it felt. The pressure of time and the pressure of the pen made

David Woodgett

The scammer in the sitting room

It began when one of the care home residents I look after asked me to take her picture for her Facebook account. Harmless enough – until I noticed the photo had been requested by Michael Bublé. The messages were affectionate and convincing and before long she was being asked for personal information. I had to find a way to gently break it to her that this was very unlikely to be Mr Bublé, which led to tears, disbelief and embarrassment. In the end, I blocked the scammer on her account – along with several other suspicious profiles. The Mental Capacity Act’s third principle states that everyone has the right to

Monday

Julie Burchill Julie Burchill

Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be ‘the end of the world’) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing to trans activists or not accepting that everything is racist. Lawrence actually said: ‘Election after election, celebrities do not make a difference whatsoever on who people vote for’ – or as I wrote here in the spring: ‘How dim would a political party need to be to understand that not only do celeb endorsements not work, but have an

Rob Crossan

Have we learned anything in the 30 years since Leah Betts died?

In the mid-1990s, ecstasy was a drug of the suburbs. My friends and I, all A-level students and shortly to become beneficiaries of the final years of higher education that didn’t come with tuition fees, did not fit the model of ‘drug users’ that the media, still in thrall to 1980s heroin hyperbole, fixated on. When we took ecstasy, it was in the clipped gardens of semi-detached houses that had been vacated by parents for the weekend. We popped pills in beer gardens, in rickety small-town clubs with swirly carpets and fogged mirrors or, in summer, in the sun-bleached parks of central Chester. We cared not for the risks, judging