Visitors to Thomas Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset, a small thatched cottage built by Hardy’s great-grandfather, used to be met by a bare house and a guide book. Now they are greeted by a fire in the grate and a curator at the parlour table, dispensing tea and cakes and chatting about the author’s childhood. Those
Uncle Norman likes to talk about the year the mini-skirt was born. (The name has been changed to protect him.) It was 1965 and he was a law student living in Chelsea. And when the skirt arrived, he took a year off university, and spent it on the No. 22 bus on the King’s Road,
To New York, for a benefit gala at Cipriani 42nd Street for the Norman Mailer Centre and Writers Colony. We are there as a team to present British GQ’s first student writing award to a 65-year-old mother of two: Helen Madden, who presented the children’s TV show Romper Room in the early 1970s and still
While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting
Every now and again you read about ‘Empty Nest Syndrome’ — a curious affliction suffered by parents who are sad that their children have left home. It sounds like heaven to me. My wife and I should be, well, free as a bird now that all our little ones have fled to university and beyond.
I am not unemployed due to laziness. I have ambitions. I would like to be successful. I would like to have a beautiful, grounded wife, children, and earn a good crust. My grandfather, who died before I was born, was in the Navy during the second world war. In his field he was an important
‘The army, navy and air force are so 20th century. Scrap them and have a massive British Marine Corps.’ Just a few hours after the publication of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, two crack teams of speakers clashed over the future of the armed forces at the Spectator debate. Brigadier Allan Mallinson, the novelist
To listen to the reporting of the Chancellor’s phased and rather limited spending cuts, you would think that the gates of fiscal hell opened at 12.30 p.m. on Wednesday. They are the ‘most savage cuts in our lifetime’, said an ITV reporter. The ‘fastest, deepest cuts in public spending ever mounted by a government in
Lana Lawless, a stocky blonde in her fifties, stepped up to the tee at the 2008 World Long Drive Championship and smashed the ball into a 40 mile per hour headwind. It landed 254 yards away, the length of two-and-a-half football pitches. With that swing, Lawless became women’s world champion. At the turn of the
‘I think he is probably the devil,’ said the work experience boy when I was going to meet Derren Brown, the magician, mindreader, ‘psychological illusionist’, what-have-you. ‘Because he does exactly what I’d do if I was the devil, which is pretend he can’t really do magic and that it’s all just a trick.’ Brown turns
It’s a wise child, they say, that knows its own father. Nowadays, however, wisdom is hardly required; DNA tests can do the job with scientific certainty. For the entire course of human history, men have nursed profound, troubling doubts about the fundamental question of whether or not they were fathers to their own children; women,
The question I’m most often asked is this. How did I end up living and working in south London instead of doing what most reasonably successful movie actors tend to do — sitting around a kidney-shaped swimming pool in Beverly Hills, sipping cocktails and collecting cheques? The question I most often ask myself is a
Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at last week’s Spectator debate. Proposing the motion ‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’, the Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin said that the child of a friend had been denounced as ‘satanic’ at his Christian school for
The Conservatives have proved unafraid of making enemies with their cuts. It’s less clear that they know who their friends are With all the spending review figures published, one question still hangs in the air: whose side is the coalition on? Families with teenagers? No, they’ll be hit by higher university fees. Families where the
America’s politicians are hopeless at understanding other countries – but they’re not alone in that Ever since the United States rose to great power status, it has displayed bouts of appalling ignorance about the politics and cultures of the rest of the world. Pick a region, any region, and one can find quotations and policies
‘Taxpayers’ money should not fund faith schools’ Ninja Turtles were the first witnesses at the Spectator debate. The motion ‘Taxpayers’ Money Should Not Fund Faith Schools’ was proposed by Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin. She evoked the green cartoon reptiles as proof that faith schools are discriminatory and irrational. The child of a friend had
Amsterdam Be careful if you are planning to attack a Jew in Amsterdam. What you see is not always what you get. Throw a rock or spit at some bloke with long curly sidelocks and a yarmulke and before you know it you might end up handcuffed in the back of a police van. What
A trip to the local bodybuilders’ gym under the influence of muscle drugs If you want to get ahead in sports, there’s nothing better than a nice big helping of performance-enhancing drugs. Just ask the guys on the Tour de France. At the end of last month the Spanish cyclist and three-times Tour winner Alberto
So we are to have a new industrial policy, this one courtesy of the coalition government and, more specifically, George Osborne and Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Transport Secretary. Both are economically literate, professing faith in markets as allocators of resources; but they have found the lure of shaping the economy
New Labour Islington is no more – it is now an area for Tory-voting bankers When I grew up in Islington in the 1980s and 90s, there was a reliable election ritual: the bigger the Georgian villa, the more likely the resident barrister was to put up a Labour poster in his sash window. If