Oh, to be in America, where cultural decay and self-destruction compete equally with hyper-feminist and anti-racist agendas. Gone with the Wind is now off limits and Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond is unlikely to remain standing (I give it a week at most). And over here poor old Winnie is also in the you-know-what.
I took a table on the terrace of the reopened bar and ordered une pression from the waitress. ‘Back to normal, thank goodness,’ I ventured to the chap sitting alone at the next table. He was staring at the centimetre of lager remaining in the bottom of his glass. The cheapness of his clothes and
Opting out of organ donation was one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I don’t mean the decision was hard. There’s no way I’m donating my body parts to the state. The hard bit was completing the online form and getting the NHS to accept my decision. If you didn’t notice, the
As regular followers of these offers will know, Jason Yapp and Tom Ashworth, co-proprietors of Yapp Bros (they are, in fact, step-bros), are a wicked, evil pair. Nothing delights them more than luring innocent and naïve drinks writers to their doom over endless glasses of their vino. I’ve lost count of the number of times
Back in April, The Spectator ran a feature in which the partners of regular contributors wrote about what it was like being stuck in quarantine with the likes of us. What Caroline had to say was not very flattering: ‘Toby spent the first week of lockdown in bed convinced he had coronavirus. He didn’t. He
Q. I know it is rude to ask, when invited to a dinner party, ‘who else is coming?’ I assumed, therefore, that it would have been equally churlish to ask, when invited to a private piano recital to be staged in the garden of a large country house, ‘what is the repertoire?’ And so I
Drive-through restaurants were invented so Americans could spend more time in their cars. I don’t blame them. American cars are wonderful if you like cars with fins; so, in theory, is fast food, which is more accurately called fast death, even if they did not know that in 1947. There is a contradiction to the
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives
When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was
