It wasn’t until I locked eyes with a Premiership rugby player as I got out of my car at 8 a.m. that I realised I might need to up my game for drop-offs at the children’s new school. I would need to start wearing eye make-up, for starters. I should also give a little more
42 min listen
This week: the carve-up of Ukraine’s natural resources From the success of Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington to the squabbling we saw in the Oval Office and the breakdown of security guarantees for Ukraine – we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly of geopolitics in the last week, say Niall Ferguson and
It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the risks of an elective caesarean (ELCS). We agree a date, I sign the forms, then make a plea for adequate pain relief after the surgery, which I know will be ignored. So I was blindsided
Of all the aspects of dating that make me grateful I came off the market when I did – ghosting, choking, sober socialising, facial hair like Brahms’s beard – it’s the spread of large-scale visible tattoos that makes me feel like I got the last chopper out of ’Nam. Neck tattoos and sleeves were once
40 min listen
This week: The Spectator launches SPAFF The civil service does one thing right, writes The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons: spaffing money away. The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on wasteful spending – the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF. Examples of waste range from
It’s a summer’s day in Suffolk, some time in 1992. My best friend Rebecca and I are both 14 and lying on our backs in a field. We have a packet of ten Silk Cut between us, and we are practising blowing smoke rings that will make us irresistible to boys. Everyone we fancy smokes:
Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this
At this time of year, switching on the radio to hear the twinkling harp at the start of ‘The First Nowell’ from Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony has a profound Proustian effect on an entire generation. It takes us back to our childhood living rooms in 1984, sitting cross-legged in front of a boxy TV with a
Mark Darcy’s Christmas jumper has come a long way since it repelled the heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) at her mother’s annual New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet. The green turtleneck, festooned with a red-nosed reindeer, sold for £5,670 at auction in November. Colin Firth has protested that he’s been ‘unfairly blamed for subsequent
At this time of year I’d usually be writing dozens of Christmas cards, with a Snowball to hand, heavy on the Advocaat. Many would be to people with whom I have no contact at any other time of year. It can be quietly meditative to write a note with an actual fountain pen to an
38 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the jukebox, is coming back. Launched in 1953 by Francis Showering of the Somerset cider family, it was aimed at giving women something to drink in the pub other than a port and lemon. Demand for
‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his
It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t
It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons
43 min listen
This week: who’s on top in the Conservative leadership race? That’s the question Katy Balls asks in the magazine this week as she looks ahead to the Conservative Party conference. Each Tory hopeful will be pitching for the support of MPs and the party faithful ahead of the next round of voting. Who’s got the
There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not
The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain. Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a
35 min listen
This week: Gus Carter reports from Rotherham (01:10), Paul Wood asks whether anything can stop full-scale conflict in the Middle East (05:55), Jonathan Aitken takes us inside Nixon’s resignation melodrama (16:55), Laura Gascoigne reviews Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines (26:08), and Flora Watkins reads her notes on ragwort (31:24). Produced and
White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the first year I can remember when it’s been superseded by the retina-scorching yellow of ragwort. Whether you consider common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) the ‘yellow peril’ or a precious wildflower crucial to biodiversity depends on whether
