John McEwen applauds the ‘Age of Titian’ in Edinburgh, and other Festival treats Sir Timothy Clifford celebrates the completion of the Playfair Project, uniting the 19th-century architect William Playfair’s two art temples on Edinburgh’s Mound, with an exhibition that is both a witty deceit and appropriately self-congratulatory. The Project gives Edinburgh an ‘exhibition complex’ that
Ella Windsor says that if you don’t like pigging out, you won’t much enjoy eating in the US, where The Cheesecake Factory serves portions big enough to kill an ox My American friends in England never stop complaining about the food here. It’s all ‘gloopy’, they say, and they bitch about the warm beer, grey
The compensation culture costs Britain £10 billion a year. David Davis blames the human rights industry One hardly knows where to start. The teacher who won £55,000 from the taxpayer because she slipped on a chip. The parents of the Girl Guide who won £3,500 after singeing her fingers cooking sausages. The prisoner who successfully
I am not sure whether it is a good thing or a bad thing that there is almost no oil left anywhere in the world. Out of a sort of childish spite, one is obviously delighted that soon enough countries like Saudi Arabia will have nothing with which to hold the world to ransom. And
This week an unusual piece of junk mail joined the forest of pizza delivery leaflets and minicab cards on my doormat. It was a white envelope marked with six chunky coloured circles under which was written: ‘Inside: Important Information from HM Government’. I assumed the ‘important information’ would be that I had been specially selected
If you consult The Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists on the subject of William Hodges, the brief entry will inform you that he was a British landscape painter, pupil of Richard Wilson ‘and his most accomplished imitator’, and that not finding success in London he joined Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific
The last time I visited my cousins — three boys between the ages of eight and 13 — they were playing a new video game that their mother had bought for them. The eight-year-old had hooked the computer up to an overhead projector and was cruising city streets in an enormous tank, pausing occasionally to
I knew Bernard Levin when we both worked on The Spectator at the end of the Fifties, during its uncharacteristically radical period. He wrote a parliamentary sketch under the name of Taper, and was about the first to treat the political scene as theatre — and amateur theatre at that — rather than a court
Andrew Kenny says that the National party has met its logical end — in the bosom of the racist ANC Last week an Afrikaans man with a plump face, large spectacles and the nickname of ‘Kortbroek’ (Short Pants) announced that he was joining the ANC. Thus ends the 90-year history of the most radical and
There has seldom been a time when responsible, intelligent people were less interested in serious politics. The main opposition, gripped by some Freudian delusion because reality is too hard to bear, behaves as if it were still the government and so cannot oppose or even think about doing so. The discourse of the mainstream parties
The chances are that if you’re nearing 30, you have begun to feel the itch of dissatisfaction. You’ve struggled to find the perfect profession, job, partner and home, but have failed in at least one respect, and are suffering from a sense of existential disgruntlement that is becoming known as the quarter-life crisis. But however
If there is a crisis in a remote place, and governments, newspapers and aid agencies start to agitate for ‘action’, you naturally begin to suspect that much of the information you are being fed is false. When Tony Blair starts talking about intervention, your suspicion turns into virtual certainty. This is not necessarily because journalists,
The world is, we are told day after day, week after week, going to hell in a handcart. After the most brutal, catastrophic and inhuman century in history, the new millennium has kicked off in the way it clearly intends to go on. War, famine and pestilence stalk the savannahs and forests of Africa. The
Mummies have exerted a strange fascination over Westerners ever since the first tomb was rifled and its contents transported to Europe. At one point, the unwrapping of mummified bodies became fashionable events to which came fee-paying audiences of the rich. Lord Londesborough’s At Home card, for Monday, 10 June 1850, was a numbered invitation to
Young men are being bullied into examining themselves for testicular cancer. It’s not very dignified, says Brendan O’Neill, and may do more harm than good Why is New Britain so obsessed with its young men’s testicles? If, like me, you are aged between 15 and 34 you will almost certainly have been advised by a
Ross Clark says that if the government were to mount a real fight, we could defeat the animal rights terrorists — and prevent unnecessary suffering in the laboratories Besides the hefty clunk of The Spectator on your doormat this week, you will shortly be receiving HMG’s advice on how citizens should cope with a terrorist
Much as I sympathise with those caught up in petty local government bureaucracy, every so often there emerges a sob story which somehow fails to tug the heartstrings. Last week in the Daily Mail, cancer fundraiser Ipek Williamson was moaning that Cotswold District Council had wiped out the profit from a garden party she had
Rachel Johnson on why so many children’s books are about sex (or ‘shagging’) and hard-core social issues ‘I sit on the toilet, pushing it all into my hand, and then I paint the walls brown. Brown to wash out the white of my anger. Brown to make them hate me. Oh, how they hate me.
There’s no plot, says Anthony Browne: Islam really does want to conquer the world. That’s because Muslims, unlike many Christians, actually believe they are right, and that their religion is the path to salvation for all A year ago I had lunch with an eminent figure who asked if I thought she was mad. ‘No,’
Last year nearly 400 people died waiting for a transplant, says Candida Moss. ‘Presumed consent’ could have saved their lives I was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease in August 1996, when I was 17. Twenty minutes before the diagnosis I was on top of the world: I had just passed my A-levels and was looking