Spectator Life

Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.

Blooming marvellous: the year’s best gardening books

I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still. Mark Catesby was ‘a procurer of plants’,

Today’s oldies don’t envy the young

Next year, I will be 65. At 65, one leaves the plateau of middle age and enters the foothills of senescence. For some, it’s an uneventful milestone marked by tidying up some herbaceous borders or experimenting with pesto; others yield to mortal panic and max out their credit card on something wildly impractical. On reaching

Helping veterans find their next mission

Last month, Keir Starmer made an announcement that sounded full of governmental largesse. From henceforth, the Prime Minister said, ex-servicemen would be exempt from local connection tests for social housing for ever, guaranteeing them a roof over their heads. ‘The military is a brilliant mechanism for social mobility… but it can be difficult to continue

Oxford University and the abuse of titles

Those casting their eye over the candidate list for the chancellorship of Oxford University might be forgiven for believing that social mobility has drastically reduced, returning to Trollopean quantities of languid toffs taking part in public life. Competing for the honour are Lord Peter Mandelson and Lord William Hague, both, you might think, the younger

All Souls is the SAS of academia

‘What sort of book might Satan write?’ ‘Why do people watch horror films?’ ‘Should we give up hope?’ These were three of the questions faced earlier this year by candidates seeking admission to All Souls College, Oxford, Britain’s most elite academic institution. Founded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Henry Chichele, and King Henry VI in

The royal love triangle that led to Montecito

Were The Duke and Duchess of Sussex to leave their mansion in Montecito, California, and head a couple of miles across town, to Toro Canyon, they would soon find themselves at the one-time home of a woman whose story they would find rather relatable. Because the former occupant once drove a wedge between the Prince

What’s sadder than an ageing rocker?

‘Old soldiers…’ they used to say, ‘never die. They simply fade away.’ What a shame that the same can’t be said of old rock stars. The old codgers can’t be cajoled, shamed or otherwise persuaded to kindly leave the stages they have profitably adorned for half a century or more. My lifelong rock hero, Jim

Stephen Daisley

Make Halloween scary again

It was the early evening of 31 October and I was three years old, sitting in the living room with Mum, on the brink of bedtime, when I turned to the corner and a decorative wicker armchair. (It was the 1980s.) ‘Mum,’ I enquired sweetly, ‘who’s that man sitting there?’ Mum, suitably unnerved, asked me

Ben Lazarus

Will councils soon be digging up the dead?

I’ve been fighting Brent Council over some graves. Paddington Old Cemetery is dilapidated and Victorian and has been classified as a park by Historic England for decades. Only a tiny section of its 24 acres is used for new burials. Without life, cemeteries attract foxes (who mess on graves), and the wrong type of people

The debauched posh are back

‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his

Julie Burchill

Where are the small boat babes?

Realising that I was one of only two non-Polish women while partying with the youngsters from my local Pizza Express – my home-from-home for a decade now – I had to laugh at myself. How I love my waitress mates; Marta, Polina and Camila have become almost like family, showing up self-funded and shoutily supportive at my

Che Guevara was a sadist

Che Guevara died 57 years ago this month and yet, even now, he remains the epitome of revolutionary cool. You never know when he is going to pop up. I came across him recently in the lobby of a hotel in Kandy in the highlands of Sri Lanka. There he was with that determined, heroic

Are you ready for the baby wars?

Such an awful lot of stuff is happening right now, even the keenest observer of social trends could be forgiven for missing a statistical milestone passed earlier this month. So here it is: at the beginning of October, it was revealed that, for the first time since the 1970s baby bust, deaths outnumbered births in

The cult of true crime 

‘I love serial killers,’ explained Megan, 29, from Kent. ‘People think I’m weird; my sister thinks I’m going to kill someone.’ She travelled to London for the weekend for CrimeCon, a convention dedicated to true-crime lovers. Here, for the eye-watering price of £700 for the two days, strangers can come together to meet the survivors

My life as a historian of the Great War

As the author of eight non-fiction books, I am most often asked why did I chose to write a particular title. The answer is that my books are usually written out of obsession: to slake my personal thirst for knowledge on the subject in question – almost irrespective of whether the topic would interest anyone

Philip Patrick

I think we’re turning Japanese

Japanese culture is rapidly colonising the West, from our theatres to our cinemas, to our streaming services and our bookshops, to the food we eat and the clothes we wear, even the footballers we cheer on. This year alone I must have written half a dozen articles on different areas where Japanese culture is making

The nonsense of Frieze

And so ends another Frieze, where art lovers from across the globe gather to admire each other’s horn-rimmed spectacles, regulation black attire and wacky hairdos. Like so many creative events held in the capital, Frieze isn’t so much about looking at interesting artwork as being seen to be looking at interesting artwork. The fair is

Katy Balls

The Tracy-Ann Oberman Edition

31 min listen

Actress and writer Tracy-Ann Oberman is well known for her roles across theatre, radio and television, including Dr Who, Friday Night Dinner, It’s a Sin and, of course, EastEnders. Most recently, she has taken on one of the most famous, and problematic, Shakespearean roles: as Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Inspired by her great-grandmother, she has reimagined the role as

Science needs Russians

Something extraordinary has happened. It wasn’t just the docking of a SpaceX capsule at the International Space Station, some 250 miles above the Earth, on a mission to rescue stranded astronauts. It was the sight of Americans and Russians embracing. As the new arrivals – Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov – appeared through the hatch,

Royal Mail is a right royal mess

Benjamin Franklin famously said that there are only two certainties in life: death, and taxes. It turns out there is a third: Royal Mail not delivering post on time. I live in East Oxford, where Royal Mail has not met its target of delivering 91.5 per cent of all first-class mail by the next working

Bring back the stiffy!

The other day, clearing out boxes, I stumbled on a sheaf of invitations from childhood. Decorated with trains and fairies, they are very similar to those my children still (just about) receive today, except there’s usually a Thelwell pony instead of Elsa from Frozen. The handwritten addresses, the names of the houses and streets (Bluebell

Punk may be dead, but the Sex Pistols aren’t

Pull those ripped tartan trews on lads, the Sex Pistols are back! Well, kind of. Lead singer John Joseph Lydon, aka ‘Rotten’, is livid that the other three surviving members have decided to perform a couple of charity gigs without his consent. Really? Punks doing charity gigs? Sid Vicious must be turning in his Pennsylvanian

What Robert Jenrick can learn from Oktoberfest

Sitting in a gigantic marquee on the green edge of Munich, surrounded by thousands of boozy Germans singing along to a Bavarian oompah band, I wonder how I got talked into coming to another Oktoberfest. Last time I came, ten years ago, I hated it and swore I’d never come again, but this time feels

How can we trust the National Trust?

A few weeks ago I felt it was my civic duty to draw attention to the many grammatical mistakes and spelling errors in the National Trust’s pronouncements. The abundance of howlers seemed to constitute something of an educational hazard: ‘How many impressionable schoolchildren will assume that the phrase “It’s [sic] location is unknown”, published by

Gareth Roberts

Fans have ruined Wodehouse and Monty Python

Why do we decide something is not for us? This is a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve got older, and started to take a liking to various cultural products that I’d previously marked down – in some cases, for decades – as absolutely unpalatable. Is this a sign of a maturing, more tolerant palate?

The best short novels for screen-addled minds

Who honestly has the time or inclination to finish long novels these days? I yearn for a serene period when I can read The Red and the Black or The Raj Quartet each night before bedtime, but I seem to be imagining someone else’s life. When new content, cool and engaging, is flooded onto YouTube

Paul Wood, Ross Clark, Andrew Lycett, Laura Gascoigne and Henry Jeffreys

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: as Lebanon reels from the exploding pagers, Paul Wood wonders what’s next for Israel and Hezbollah (1:24); Ross Clark examines Ireland’s low-tax project, following the news that they’re set to receive €13 billion… that they didn’t want (8:40); Reviewing Ben Macintyre’s new book, Andrew Lycett looks at the 1980 Iranian