All too late in the day, I have come to worry about the stuff I put out in my waste bins. It is not the recycling issue that bothers me, but what council officials, poring over my detritus with rubber gloves in some sanitised hell in Maidstone, might find out about me, and what they
Don’t knock daytime TV, says Lloyd Evans. It may be mindless and banal, but it is entertainment in its purest form It’s happening right now. I just had a flick-through and it’s all going on. You wouldn’t believe it. A Labrador called Pongo has been squashed by a tractor and is having his broken paw
Lord Mandelson’s memoirs left the real questions unanswered, says Trevor Kavanagh. If even he won’t tell the truth about the Blair-Brown years, who will? Peter Mandelson had a rich seam before him as he sat down to write The Third Man. He was present at the birth of New Labour, helped plot its path to
The publicity frenzy over Paul the octopus, who accurately predicted the results of the World Cup by opening boxes labelled with team colours, has concealed something much more interesting than his apparent psychic powers. Here is an animal with a third of his nervous system outside his brain and no central spinal column who is
By the age of 21 Geoffrey Wellum knew his life had peaked. It was downhill from here on in. He was a squadron leader and had won a DFC. Moreover, he had lived through the Battle of Britain. Today, he is one of the few of ‘The Few’ left to tell the tale of how
Alex Murray was detained for two hours by Special Branch at Gatwick for using the word ‘bomb’ at security — and finds that in this age of terrorism airport staff just can’t take a joke I live in France, but because I have family in England and Belgium, I travel frequently. And so, on the
What on earth is the government going to do about all these deranged northerners running amok shooting people? The more callous among you might well argue that it doesn’t really matter, as these madmen are only shooting other northerners, and so it is therefore none of our business. Perhaps. But there is no guarantee that
Part of me feels that those who have helped to bring the country down — venal politicians, false educators, degraders of the media, thieving privatisers of the public domain — need to be fought to a standstill, here on this battlefield, by those with the energy, strength and clarity of mind to do so. For
In Britain we are now glumly entering the age of austerity and everyone expects unemployment to go on rising. This has been the case in the past: even when the economy starts to grow, there is a painfully long lag before unemployment starts to fall. But not in Switzerland is different. There, unemployment is already
Quietly, David Cameron is warming to Nick Clegg’s proposed plans for voting reform — even though it could bind the two parties together for a decade or more. James Forsyth on a Tory gamble that dares not speak its name On the Monday after the election, David Cameron summoned his front bench for not one
Theo Hobson is depressed by the media’s rapturous welcome for Grindr, a new software device that helps gay men locate each other for impromptu sex I am not a homophobe. But I suppose I might be a pinkophobe. I do not think that homosexuality is wrong, bad, inferior, hateful in the eyes of God. And
For almost three decades the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, who died last week, wrote book reviews and diaries for The Spectator. They were, without exception, brilliant. It has been said over the last week that she was the best novelist of her generation, but she was also (though a life-long Labour voter) the best sort of
With preparations for the Pope’s visit to Britain in disarray, the government called in Lord Patten to smooth things out. He tells Damian Thompson why he is up to the task Prime Ministers do not always enjoy reading The Spectator and a month ago we ran a cover story that was — I am told
Will Steve Jobs go down as the saviour of the British newspaper industry? Quite possibly, if iPads are the big Christmas hit this year. That would mean they are becoming essential gadgets for business people, commuters, air travellers and the reading classes in general. They might just mark a turning-point for the fortunes of a
Almost unnoticed, in May, during the first weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a new era in man’s exploitation of the oceans began. The Chinese government lodged an application with the United Nations to mine for minerals on a ridge 1,700 metres down in the south-west Indian Ocean, outside
At the turn of the 20th century, an army of half a million Tommies imposed Britain’s will on the Boers, yet this nominal victory served chiefly to accelerate the downward spiral of British power. Foolishly attempting to recover its imperial holdings in Indochina after the second world war, France succeeded only in showing how weak
Why must government be ‘representative’, asks Carol Sarler. It makes no sense. We must fight back against this pernicious new orthodoxy Only a week ago, as Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia, the sheilahood could scarcely believe its luck. A woman, no less! And not just any woman, either: Miss Gillard
The name Bernard Lewis provokes very different reactions in different people. For some he is the world’s foremost historian of Islam and the Middle East, the English academic who originally coined the term ‘clash of civilisations’ (as Samuel Huntingdon, who popularised it, freely acknowledged). For some he is a Princeton man, a neocon who celebrated
William Cook, a ‘closet Kraut’, grew up feeling ashamed of his country. This summer, during the World Cup, he finds that the stigma has finally lifted I’m standing in a noisy bar in south London, watching a World Cup match on a giant TV screen, hemmed in on all sides by happy, tipsy football fans.
‘Was it Vauvenargues or Chamfort,’ asks Pierre Costals in Henri de Montherlant’s novel Pity for Women, ‘who said that one must choose between loving women and understanding them?’ Most men would rather love women than understand them, and most women would rather be loved than understood. Women particularly resent men taking a scalpel to dissect,