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
For fans of Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s unique blend of high comedy and shrewd social observation, a new book is cause to leap on to the nearest chair and emit several loud shrieks. Jobs for the Girls is the third in the author’s trilogy on ‘lost worlds of Britain’. These are recent, touchable lost worlds, she
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
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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 But 2024 is the first year I can remember when it’s been superseded by the retina-scorching yellow of ragwort.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
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: after President Biden’s debate disaster, Freddy Gray profiles the one woman who could persuade him to step down, his wife Jill (1:05); Angus Colwell reports from Israel, where escalation of war seems a very real possibility (9:02); Matthew Parris attempts to reappraise the past 14 years of Conservative government (14:16);
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and tonic in the drinks holder, while my sons are at cricket practice. It’s an inclement evening, but were it a sunny summer’s day, the Yummy Mummies would be sprawled around the boundary in their Veja
As any child of the 1980s could tell you, whether your house had a Sky dish had nothing to do with income. The launch of BSkyB in 1989 – when Rishi Sunak was eight and I was 10 – was greeted with horror by our middle-class professional parents, just as with their parent’s generation when
Given that I know the author, would I feel inhibited about reviewing her new book critically, I asked myself. But other than meeting her once at a party for two minutes, I realised that I know Clover Stroud only through her raw, ravishing memoirs and – like the rest of her 37,000 Instagram followers –
Churchill had his black dog tailing him around. I used to have black horses galloping through my head. They careered around out of control, rendering me so anxious that I couldn’t sleep the night before I was due to heave myself into the saddle as a civilian support rider for the Household Cavalry. So the
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This week: The Xi files: China’s global spy network. A Tory parliamentary aide and an academic were arrested this week for allegedly passing ‘prejudicial information’ to China. In his cover piece Nigel Inkster, MI6’s former director of operations and intelligence, explains the nature of this global spy network: hacking, bribery, manhunts for targets and more.
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book groups where someone would insist, ‘We really must do Dostoevsky this year.’ Members of the JCBC, in a co-founder’s words, just wanted to get together to ‘drink champagne and shriek about Jilly’. ‘Book clubs are
It’s a long time since I took a powerful drug that wasn’t dispensed by a pharmacist. Last winter, during what has become the annual post-Christmas Covid collapse, I searched in vain for the codeine cough linctus I’d been prescribed when the virus first struck four years ago. Why must we suffer because a few scrotes
In the end, it was the sports kit that persuaded us to pull the plug: two technical training tops at a cost of £90. A directive had come down from the senior school that all pupils must be in new gear from Kukri (official supplier to county cricket clubs and Commonwealth Games England) by the
Pony rides were once a staple of every village, church and primary-school fête. A brusque, horsey mother would swing you up into the saddle, and the patient pony would trudge up and down while you clung to its mane, before it was the turn of the next child in the queue. No one ever plonked
As spring (finally) arrives, it’s time to turn our attention back to what’s outside the back door. Helpfully, garden designer Isabel Bannerman (Highgrove, Houghton Hall, Arundel Castle) has written a memoir, Husbandry, in which she declares there is no such thing as ‘U and non-U’ in gardening. She then undermines her argument by immediately setting out
Ping! My phone vibrates with a message from a new friend. A mild spike of dopamine dissipates on seeing she’s left me a WhatsApp voice note. However, it’s short and, hopefully, it’s a one-off. I reply with a text message, hoping she’ll register the switch in communications. Ping! Oh no. She’s a voice-noter. She’s a bloody
When I lived in north London as a postgraduate student, my flatmates amused themselves by shouting abusive names at the then member for Henley as he cycled past on his way to the Commons from his house in Islington. But judging by the reaction from my old neighbours in Herne Hill, Boris Johnson is likely
‘Ah,’ says my husband at the top of the cliff path at Overstrand, ‘it’s just like a Shirley Hughes illustration.’ There are sandcastles, wooden groynes, children and dogs running in and out of the waves. Then his eye falls on the first land grab of the day. Three generations of the same family are hard
There’s an old saying that English summertime begins when the frothy heads of elderflowers appear in hedgerows – and ends when the black elderberries have ripened. People have been picking these great white ‘plates’, as the flower heads are known, to make drinks since at least Tudor times. In Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery
