Spectator Life

I learned recently that Mumsnet is 25 years old, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell is still using Mumsnet? And then I read that Mumsnet has nine million unique users every month, and my immediate reaction was: who the hell are these people? According to Mumsnet, they’re almost all women, but I don’t

In 1906, Sir Francis Galton observed a crowd at a country fair in Plymouth attempting to guess the weight of an ox. Nearly 800 people participated – from butchers and farmers to busy fishwives. Galton, ever the measurer of men and beasts, gathered the guesses and calculated their average. The result was startling: the crowd’s

Seeing that photograph of J.K. Rowling, I reflected gleefully that her journey from mousey, play-nice moderate to unapologetically glam and flamboyantly defiant fox is complete. It’s not often that glamour and righteousness come along in one person – but when it occasionally happens, as her caption said, ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’

I blame The Spectator. The chain of events that has led me to be christened and confirmed in the Anglican Church began with an article I wrote for Spectator Life in January. I had spent New Year’s Eve with a friend, a former vicar, who had lost his faith and honourably resigned his living as

So, you thought the date of Easter, which rambles irritatingly round the spring calendar, was settled by the Synod of Whitby, no? That gathering in 664 AD, which established that Northumbria would celebrate Easter in the Roman calendar, used to be one of the events that Every Schoolboy Knows, though probably not now. There were

For the first half of the 2010s, any teenage girl in her room had a chance of amassing more political influence than a junior Spad. She could define political terms and concepts, blacklist undesirable elements, and argue for a different kind of society. Thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of other teenage girls would be following

Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years,

You will be aware that we face a national emergency. I’m not referring to the fact that our closest ally has seemingly taken leave of its senses or the astonishing news that apparently one in four Britons is now disabled – nor that more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive.

Sometimes it seemed to me as a young hack that writing obituaries must be the best job in newspapers. You can’t get sued – though people tend not to take the gloves off out of ‘respect’ and use ancient phrases like ‘bon viveur’ and ‘did not suffer fools gladly’ when everyone knows you mean ‘well-connected

At last, somebody has said it. Busking is akin to psychological torture, especially for those who have to live or work within earshot. This damning comparison came from no less than a judge at the City of London magistrates’ court, following a suit brought by Global Radio, the Leicester Square-based owner of LBC and Classic

My home city of Oxford has been ravaged by shop closures over the past decade but there is still one outstanding second-hand bookshop (the estimable antiquarian department at Blackwell’s apart) and it’s the Oxfam bookshop on St Giles. Thanks to a regular donations from dons and writers, there are invariably high-quality and interesting items on

Once at my old local paper, the Grimsby Evening Telegraph, a trainee made the mistake of sniggering when asked to cover the allotments sub-committee. ‘Don’t ever fuck with allotment holders,’ the news editor warned. ‘It may not matter to you, but they take those little patches of land very seriously indeed.’ Like most of the

How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it.

It is the evening of Monday 23 September 1985. A band called the June Brides are playing a free gig in the bar of Manchester Polytechnic’s Students Union, the Mandela Building (of course) on Oxford Road. I find myself among the audience of freshers’ week first-year undergraduates. I am 18, a small-town boy who’s been

I like to think of myself as good at making friends. I tend to rank them. There are kindred spirits (rare), very good friends (perhaps five at the most), and good (ten or more). Friendships, like plants, need looking after; they require time and attention. One rank below friends are acquaintances. Acquaintances add warmth and

Is nothing sacred? Not quite, as it turns out. There remains one last object of piety in these, the early days of the third Christian millennium (don’t laugh). Surprisingly, it is a fictional bear from darkest Peru. Yes, Paddington is back in the news. Because he hath been desecrated. There is, or was, a sedentary

I’ve been to a few underwhelming Unesco World Heritage Sites. Take the Struve Geodetic Arc, which curves almost invisibly across Eastern Europe. I visited without even realising. As for the Fray Bentos corned beef factory, in Uruguay, I’m writing this about 20 minutes from the Fray Bentos corned beef factory and I’m still reluctant to

Years ago, newly triumphant from getting my first book published, I went to my parents’ house for a celebration dinner. Having duly toasted their son’s modest literary success, they then revealed that I wasn’t the new author in their social circle. An old university friend of theirs from Holland – we’ll call him Jörg –

According to MailOnline, Kate Moss ‘sparked fan concern as she’s spotted looking “fraught” and “on edge” at Paris Fashion Week’. Good. Kate Moss is one of the very rare celebrities who I’m interested in – because she’s one of the very few celebrities who’s interesting – but in recent years she has become a bit

Time was, you knew where you were with the patron saint of Ireland whose feast is 17 March. He was a Briton and he tells us in his Confessions that, when he was a teenager, he was captured by Irish slave traders and taken to Ireland, where he herded sheep. He turned to God and