Peter Thiel has been described variously as ‘America’s leading public intellectual’, the ‘architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos’ or as an ‘incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic’ malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern
Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. ‘There’s something so tactile about a book,’ she says. ‘I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…’ The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as
As Christmas approaches and we wrack our brains to find something that suits everyone, there is no present quite like a book. Whether it’s an unputdownable novel, a heart-stopping crime series, a thought-provoking biography or a collection of beautiful poetry, a book provides an escape, the perfect antidote to the hurly-burly of everyday life and,
Nigel Farage is signing football shirts when I arrive at Reform’s campaign headquarters in Millbank Tower, the building where New Labour prepared for power before 1997. The black shirts are emblazoned with ‘Farage 10’ in gold. ‘Someone called them Nazi colours,’ the leader complains. ‘This always happens when we do well.’ As favourite to be
What has gone wrong for Americans? To listen to an increasing number of politicians and pundits on both sides, from Tucker Carlson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Nick Fuentes to Zohran Mamdani, the answer seems to be: everything. Americans are unable to get a job; to afford the necessities of life; to get married or have
Our Santa Pants cocktail is one of our go-to holiday pours when hosting at this time of year. Made with our organic tequila and ginger beer, cranberry juice and fresh lime, it brings all the sparkle and cheer of the season. It is like Christmas in a glass. And while the world doesn’t need another
‘Never again!’ I sigh every 6 January, as I pack away the abundance of Christmas decorations and baubles lovingly collected over the decades. ‘It’s too much!’ I moan to Percy. ‘Let’s go to a hot island next year and get away from it all…’ But I never do, because I just love Christmas. Every year
The foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. When comet experts argued that the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS must be a familiar water-rich comet as soon as it was discovered in July, they behaved like artificial intelligence systems: only able to reflect the data sets they were trained
The Palace of Westminster, already beset by crumbling finials, has developed a damp problem. Nothing to do with bricks and mortar. We are talking about moral wetness. Has the elected House ever contained a soggier crew? Hand-wringers abound. They demand ‘apostrophe laws’ named after victims of misfortune and then announce that ‘Mavis’s mum’ – or
For me, the past 12 months have been about one man, and that man is Alan Partridge. The veteran broadcaster’s return to BBC screens this autumn, with a documentary about mental health, was only part of the story. The bigger issue is that at the turn of the year, my 13-year-old son discovered Partridge’s podcast,
W.H. Auden, in his essay on detective fiction, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, asked: ‘Is it an accident that the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries?’ He was thinking about confession and how this changes things. In Auden’s view, murder is an offence against God and society and when it happens it shows that
In August, the President of the United States declared a crime ‘emergency’ in my home town of Washington D.C. Donald Trump rules by declaring ‘emergencies’ where they don’t exist, but this was a new one. An emergency compared to what? The year I bought my condo, 1992, saw 443 homicides ina city of around half
The Amazon reviews for David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity don’t alert you to the fact that this is a book on theoretical physics. They sound more like a weepy divorcé’s YouTube comments below a Mark Knopfler guitar solo. ‘I didn’t so much read it,’ says one. ‘It read me.’ ‘I was honestly sad when
A Christmas Carol is pretty well unavoidable around now, with Little Women trailing somewhat behind. There’s no shortage of alternative literary Christmases among the classics, however, often less sweetly heartwarming and more invigoratingly grumpy. Nigel Molesworth, it will be remembered, foiled all attempts to inflict A Christmas Carol on him. ‘It is just that there
I still hang out with the same two lovable crackheads I sat beside on the first day of primary school. I keep all the stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to. I meet the same school dads in the same pub on the same night every single week and my point is that I’m
No writer has done more than Jung Chang to bring the horrors of Maoist China to the attention of western readers. In her monumental memoir Wild Swans (1991), she recounted the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution through the stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. Its influence was enormous:
‘Dearly beloved friends and family, well, what a year it’s been! Where to start?! The big event for us – aside from nurturing our preternaturally gifted children and enjoying multiple holidays in exotic locations – was the “K” for Rupert in the King’s Birthday Honours list. Mingling with the Beckhams at Buck House after the
Most of us indulge in mild fortune-telling. We think ‘If the light changes before I count to five, I’ll get the job’ or ‘If the solitaire hand comes out my tests will be negative’, and so on. We understand prophecy as the ability to foretell the future. But biblically, prophecy was not prediction but castigation.
One day while walking in Peckham Rye Park, William Blake saw angels sitting in the trees: ‘bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars’. He was eight years old. His fascination – some have called it obsession – with angels lasted for the rest of his life. When he sat to have his portrait painted
After a stellar career in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, an unassuming man with a passion for bridge and a taste for malt whisky was in line to become head of that service, or ‘C’. The year was 1990. Roger Horrell was the favoured candidate to assume control of Britain’s foreign
In preparation for the 2005 Ashes series, the late Graham Thorpe, a man I looked up to enormously, turned to me and uttered the immortal words: ‘Straussy, there is Test cricket and Ashes cricket. They are completely different things.’ Never has a truer sentence been spoken. The Ashes breaks out of the normal cricket bubble.
The new movie Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as his US Army psychiatrist, has had mixed reviews. The Spectator’s Jonathan Maitland hated it, describing it as an ‘obscenely ill-judged two hours’ filled with ‘egregious errors of taste, decency and judgment’. Some critics have given it four stars, but Peter Bradshaw
I have sweet memories of Christmas. My dad is proper old-school and would set up the video recorder. I don’t think we’ve ever watched the footage; I don’t know if he was even filming. But we couldn’t do anything until it was filmed. We never had loads of money, but Mum always went above and
There are decades when The Spectator is shorthand for a trait: sex (2000s), young fogeys (1980s), free trade (1900s). But I was surprised to find Henry James, a writer not given to shorthand, deploying the magazine’s name to give a sketch of Isabel Archer, the title character of his Portrait of a Lady: ‘She had
There is little to beat the thrill of finding a letter you didn’t know existed and being transported back in time and deep into your family’s history. Dated January 1955, it is addressed to ‘Desmond and Evelyn’ and urges them to show ‘tenacity, resolution and COURAGE’. It is signed ‘Pater’. These were the qualities deemed
There is no better time to read a Sherlock Holmes story than a winter evening. As the rain lashes against the windows and the fog descends, we can imagine ourselves sitting companionably with the great detective and the good doctor around the Baker Street hearth, waiting for the step of a visitor upon the stair.
It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the
Right, who’s doing the washing up? It’s 6 p.m. on Christmas Day and the table, which was meticulously set for 12, is now a mess of paper hats, gravy spills and glasses – so, so many glasses. Just don’t go into the kitchen, where you’ll find, in no order at all: six saucepans (unsoaked), 12
