Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.’ — Gaius Valerius Catullus ‘I do not know whom Mary Beard is but wyth a name lyke that she surely has a third teat and a hairy clopper.’ — Internet posting following Professor Mary Beard’s appearance on Question Time So Catullus, mate — things have not got much
On the patio of my hotel in Havana… No, begin again. It isn’t really a hotel, it’s a Casa Particular — someone’s home. Delia’s home: a modest ground-floor apartment in an externally shabby old stone tenement on a neglected side street near the waterfront of Old Havana. Casas Particulares are a tropical adaptation of the B&B:
David Cameron should have given his big Europe speech a year ago. Having just threatened to veto a new EU treaty, he had proved that he was prepared to aggressively defend Britain’s interests, and he had reassured those in his party who worried he wasn’t really serious about Euroscepticism. An address delivered at that point,
Torture is wrong. You can tell it’s wrong easily, not by the way it makes you feel, or by the extent to which it does or doesn’t conform to ancient moral codes made up in deserts, but by the way that, when it happens, it screws stuff up. When Barack Obama assumed office four years
In the church just a few fields from where I live stands the handsome, painted alabaster tomb to Sir Richard Knightley and his wife Jane. Round the sides of the tomb are reliefs of their 12 children — four girls and eight boys — variously the ancestors of George Washington, the Queen and David Cameron.
‘Women … are angry with ourselves for not being happier, not being loved properly and not having the ideal body shape — that of a Brazilian transsexual.’ — Suzanne Moore One of these days, not too far away, the entire bourgeois bien-pensant left will self-immolate entirely leaving behind nothing but a thin skein
Has Nick Clegg seen a ghost? The pallor of the Lib Dem leader continues to excite comment in Westminster. At Monday’s half-time presentation by the coalition, he was looking as anaemic as a jellyfish. ‘Either he’s lost four pints of blood or he’s been given his latest polling figures,’ said one hack. A friendly spin
Isn’t it time, just out of perversity, that we all signed the petition on the Operation Black Vote website to restore the part-time nurse Mary Seacole to the national curriculum? I am beginning to think that our children should learn all about this entertaining woman; she’s given me a good laugh for the last dozen
The end of an old year cast me into a portentous frame of mind as I descended a couple of thousand feet down an ancient path through forest, brush and briar to the Pantà de Susqueda: an immense, deep lake created by a dam, 400 feet high, across the gorge of the River Ter in
One of the first things that the coalition did on taking office was to announce the date of the next election. This was meant to prevent destablising speculation about when the two parties might split apart and go to the country. It has largely succeeded in doing that. But there has been an unintended side-effect.
So let us return, you and I, warily and wearily, to the topic of gay marriage. Gingerly, in fact, as though with a hangover after an ill-tempered, bickering party. And, in the cold and Nurofenned light of day, let us find our common ground, and think about where it leads. I’m still for it and
I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice,
I was just traipsing across the fields towards Common Lane, there to collect Boy en route to his St Andrews’ Day F-Blockers’ exhibition match of the Wall Game, when I was accosted by a splendid, Spectator-reading type who’d parked his car next to mine. ‘Are you James Delingpole?’ he asked. I admitted that I was.
‘The next time we want to import a horse to Russia,’ wrote Laura Brady, Second Secretary in our Moscow embassy, ‘it will be a doddle.’ I quote her story in an anthology of diplomatic writing, The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, that the BBC’s Andrew Bryson and I have collected for the new book. Miss Brady was
So the wassailing and drinking and pigging out has been done. The relatives have mercifully left. You have taken many, many medications to restore to yourself a certain cloudy consciousness and are beginning to wonder what the year ahead holds in store. Keep taking those medications, then — because here is 2013 in full. I’d
Does Santa Claus really exist? I have to say I have become very sceptical in recent years. There is something about this character which simply does not ring true, not to mention his rather sinister retinue of airborne reindeer. I am not saying that he definitely does not exist, simply that we should not be
One of David Cameron’s great skills is his ability to separate the cares of office from the rest of his life. Samantha Cameron is never likely to say, to misquote Clarissa Eden, that ‘in the past few weeks, I have really felt that the terms of the European renegotiation were flowing through my drawing room’.
The place I love more than anywhere on earth is the Edw Valley in mid-Wales. We’ve been going there every summer for more than a decade now and the kids think of it as their second home. When I die — as I nearly did once, you’ll remember, when I was carried off down the
‘“You will be haunted,” resumed the Ghost, “by Three Spirits, without their visits you cannot hope to shun the path I tread…”’ ‘“I am the Ghost of Christmas Past,” said the Apparition. “Come with me,” and Scrooge followed.’ The scene was as familiar to Ebenezer Scrooge as to any Spectator reader. Returning to the past,
To Edinburgh for Christmas this year, and I can’t wait. We’ll be leaving any day now, in our pathetic London squib of a car. You know the sort — it’s got a fuel tank the size of a milk carton and on the motorway it sounds like a bee. It never feels pathetic in London,