Spectator Life

Spectator Life

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

From the army to Folly House: the story of Jamie Snowden

It is around 3 a.m. in Northern Ireland in the early 2000s as two British soldiers share a dank ditch waiting for the dawn. ‘What will you do when you leave the army, Sir?’ asks Corporal Jordan Wylie. ‘I’m going to train racehorses,’ says Captain Jamie Snowden. ‘And I’m going to make some money and

It’s not just DeepSeek, all AI is censored

There are multiple reasons to be fascinated by DeepSeek, the Chinese AI chatbot that debuted last week, knocking Donald Trump off the headlines and $1 trillion off the US stock market. For a start, it represents yet another remarkable leap forward in the race to artificial general intelligence – which looks likely to arrive this

Pity the perpetual student

I can’t remember the exact date of my departure from university. It was sometime in the summer of 2021. My flatmates and I packed up our things, had a sombre pint at the pub, hugged, and then went our separate ways. I boarded the train at Bristol Temple Meads with a degree in English and

Other artists sing Dylan’s songs better than him

At the start of the new Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan’s protest-singer mentor Pete Seeger implores him not to swap his trusty acoustic for a newfangled Fender Stratocaster electric. ‘A good song can get the job done without the frills,’ says Seeger – who, for all his progressive views, wasn’t very hip to

Julie Burchill

In praise of hospital food

I’ve been in hospital, bed-bound, for six weeks; because I can write it’s not so bad, but between deadlines time passes slowly, so landmarks in the day come to mean a lot. Most of all, I look forward to my husband visiting at 3 p.m.; secondly, the meds trolley trundling towards me like a dear

I can’t stand Stanley Tucci

I love Italian food, and I love food writing and TV programmes, so you might think I’d love Stanley Tucci. And yet I find him creepy and his recipes are rubbish. I can’t be the only one. The actor, who I first saw in the brilliant film Big Night, about a Jersey Shore Italian-American restaurant,

Italy is most beautiful in winter

Monopoli, Puglia Monopoli is an elegant little seaside town in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, and in summer it’s unbearable. Tourists flock from everywhere. Squares you could normally zip through in a few seconds take ten minutes to cross, and the queues for Bella Blu, the ice cream parlour in Piazza Garibaldi, remind

In defence of British food

Recently in Spectator Life Rob Crossan laid bare ‘the unpalatable truth about British food’ – namely that it is, er, in some establishments he’s been to, done badly. Leaving aside the fact he’s looking for his fish and chips in the wrong place (outside the M25 it wouldn’t be such a struggle), encountering a few

The enduring charm of King Solomon’s Mines

How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert

The year of the creep

It’s only January, but I’m ready to declare my 2025 word of the year. Creep. It’s everywhere (though true to form you may not immediately spot it). The online world is no longer merely parallel. It intersects, subsumes and fuels our real world. Siri, Alexa et al lurk. The internet, email and, above all, apps

Simon Schama is a bore

When Herbert von Karajan was at his celestial height in the 1960s, juggling conducting duties at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his musicians liked to tell a joke. ‘Karajan gets in a taxi, and the driver asks, “Where to?” Karajan says, “It doesn’t matter, they want me everywhere.”’ Not

The real reason you hate vegans

Just when it seemed as though January in Britain couldn’t get any bleaker, along came ‘Veganuary’. Cue loads of puny, blue-haired wokerati spending this month preaching about how we should give up on two of man’s greatest pleasures – meat and cheese. If you’ve been finding it irritating, you’re not alone. In surveys of public

Bets for Cheltenham Trials

Tomorrow’s Cheltenham Trials Day, as its name suggests, usually throws up plenty of clues to which horses will be winning at the festival on the same course in less than two months’ time. There is no doubt which horse running tomorrow is most likely to triumph at the festival itself and that is Constitution Hill.

Keith Jarrett’s accidental masterpiece

Shortly before midnight on the evening of Friday 24 January 1975, at Cologne Opera House on the banks of the Rhine, a wiry 29-year-old from Pennsylvania walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of 1,400 people and began to play the piano, alone. The 50th anniversary of what followed is being celebrated with

The Reagan effect on wine lists

Let us indulge in a slight paraphrase. What rough beast slouches towards the White House to be reborn? The inauguration ceremonies remind us that many Americans still hanker after monarchical splendour. Even as contentious a figure as Donald Trump is accorded the dignities appropriate to a head of state. The same of course is true

Confessions of a Costco Guy

Those who use TikTok, or are familiar with Ed Davey’s dance routines on social media, may have heard of the ‘Costco Guys’. For those with an aversion to TikTok (or to Ed Davey), Andrew ‘A.J.’ Befumo Jr. and Eric ‘Big Justice’ Befumo are a father-and-son duo who became internet celebrities by gorging on food items

Philip Patrick

The Arts Council should subsidise footballers

The Norwegian footballer Erling Haaland will, upon commencement of his new nine-year contract extension with Manchester City, be paid £1 million a week. On pocketing his first colossal pay cheque (which includes sponsorship income), Haaland will cruise past his rivals in the traditional European leagues. Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappé is forced to get by on

The vanity of hair transplants

I used to think that one of the few things that men had over women was their lack of manifest vanity. Not that men weren’t vain, but apart from turning their chests into Doritos at the gym or dyeing their greying locks that unnatural shade of black, there were very few ways for them to

I love Edinburgh. I’m not sure it loves me

This year I shall have lived in Edinburgh for a quarter of a century. I fell in love with the city on the 23 bus travelling from the New Town to the Old Town. There was so much architecture. Gothic and Georgian, medieval, baronial. So many turrets and finials, tollbooths and towers. I was drunk

How the phone colonised my life

I read recently that this month marks 40 years since Britain’s first mobile phone call was made. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day 1985 in Parliament Square, when one Michael Harrison rang his Vodafone chairman father, Sir Ernest Harrison. It would, of course, take many years – and much hankering and

Prisons must prioritise mental health

What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014.

How Margaret Thatcher’s son went missing in the Sahara

The year was 1982. Prime minister Margaret Thatcher rerouted an RAF Hercules over foreign territory and requested the scrambling of jets and choppers and ground troops. The diplomatic cables burned back and forth. President Ronald Reagan expressed concern. The situation was desperate. This wasn’t the Falklands War – that came a few months later. This,

The offal truth? Organs are delicious

I’m sure my mum would forgive me for saying this, but cooking is not one of her many strengths. Raising three children, and with a husband who worked shifts in a steel mill, she was feeding people round the clock, so cooking became a necessity rather than a pleasure – as it will have been

I became a father at 56. Now I feel guilty

I was a late starter at everything. After drifting through my youth, and numerous false starts in life and work, I only found a committed relationship in my thirties and married in my forties. Even my second career as a writer waited until my fifties. So, too, did my unexpected third career, as a parent.

Are tribute bands killing music?

If you fancy watching a live performance of Fleetwood Mac’s hits, there’s plenty of choice in tribute band land: Fleetwood Shack or Fleetwood Bac, McFleetwood or Rumours of Fleetwood Mac – or perhaps Tusk, Tell Me Lies, Fleetwood Macrame or Gypsy Dreams. Or you could wait to see if the real Fleetwood Mac tour again, minus

How to eat like a president

John F. Kennedy opted to serve New England lobster, Ronald Reagan a California-inspired garden salad – and James Buchanan 400 gallons of oysters. Held at Statuary Hall in the US Capitol, the inaugural luncheon for a new president is as much part of inauguration day as the swearing-in ceremony and the inaugural address.  Nixon enjoyed

Rachel Reeves should not pack her lunch

When Rachel Reeves was the shadow chancellor, she would round up the spare pastries at the end of meetings and save them for later. No wastage! Her intentions were surely good, but she would have known that there were witnesses, and she knows how political gossip works. Now, as chancellor of the exchequer, she has

Partridges and the slow death of Chelsea

Partridges, purveyor of ‘nice things for the larder’ to the well-heeled, will close the doors of its Chelsea shop for the last time next month. After 53 years of serving SW3 delights such as ox tongue, macadamia nuts and glace cherries, the shop, run by the Shepherd family and in possession of a royal warrant,