James Delingpole reviews television for The Spectator.
At a well-lubricated dinner the other night at a first-class Chinese restaurant called Red Emperor by the stunning riverside development on the south bank of the Yarra in Melbourne, Australia, my host made me an offer that I very nearly couldn’t refuse. ‘What would it take to persuade to you come and live in Australia?’
When is it socially acceptable for a white person to tell a black person he looks like a monkey eating a banana? For some of you the answer will be ‘never’; for others: ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe you even asked such a racist question!’ But I must confess that when my white tennis
By the time you read this it’s quite likely I shall be in mid-air on my long journey to Australia. I’m off on a month-long speaking tour to promote Killing the Earth to Save It (the Oz version of Watermelons) and I figured my flight might work out cheaper if I arranged to be travelling
The other day George Monbiot of the Guardian had me round for the weekend at his country seat in Machynlleth, Wales. You’ll never guess what we had for dinner after a fine afternoon’s sport shooting the red kite which infest that region like a verminous plague. First, we had leatherback turtle soup; then a delicious
God, I enjoyed my book launch party last week. (Though not as much as some people, eh, Toby?) So much so that I’m not sure I can ever forgive myself. I keep thinking not of the fun I had but of all those friends I wish could have been there but weren’t. My fault, totally,
If Titanic hadn’t actually sunk on its maiden voyage not even Jeffrey Archer would have dared invent such a hammily extravagant plot. The passenger list — Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV (Macy’s owner), Isidor Straus, the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson, inventor of the New Journalism W.T. Stead, and sundry English toffs — was
We all have a pretty good idea of why the Soviet Union collapsed: it’s because its state-run planned economy wasn’t as efficient as its rivals in the free-market West. The lesson we’ve learned from this is that capitalism won the political argument. But it’s a false lesson, because capitalism didn’t. The problems that made the
There’s a game you have to play at the BBC and Jeremy Paxman plays it very well — which is why he is currently still the most famous Old Malvernian after C.S. Lewis whereas I’m way down the list at maybe fourth, fifth or sixth. The rules are very simple: no matter how great your
We all know that the time before we were born was a golden age when men were manlier, women lovelier, civilisation more civilised, culture more edifying, values more valued and so on. But what if it isn’t actually true? What if, say, it turned out that Winston Churchill was damn near as slippery and unprincipled
Only this morning I got an email from an evidently very bright 17-year-old at a certain nameless public school. ‘I’m so sick of having to study “environmental ethics” for hours on end, being split into “study groups”, and making lovely colourful mind-maps for presentations; the syllabus is infantile, and I feel increasingly infantilised by my
One of my new hobbies as I get older is corrupting the young. I did so again the other day with a superbright, very nicely brought-up 11-year-old called Tilly. Her mother was trying to persuade her to read Swallows And Amazons. ‘No, wait, I’ve something much more fun, leedle girl,’ I said. ‘Try this!’ The
Masterchef (BBC1) is a total waste of life — and I should know, because I’m addicted to it. It came to me suddenly and I’m still not sure how it happened. All I know is that one year I was like: ‘Masterchef. Ah, yes, it’s that foodie programme Loyd Grossman presents, which critics always call
If the global economy goes seriously tits up — as I believe it is about to do — the important thing is that we understand the actual reasons why it went tits up. Otherwise the drastic remedial action we’ll inevitably take to ensure that it never happens again may well result in the exact opposite.
How in God’s name did Jonathan Meades ever get a job presenting TV programmes? I ask in the spirit of surprised delight rather than disgust, for Meades is that rare almost to the point of nonexistent phenomenon: the presenter who doesn’t treat you like a subnormal child or so irritate you with his incredibly infuriating
What a shame the Christmas literary recommends season is over: otherwise I would have loved to draw this to your attention as quite the funniest book of the year. In The Reactionary Mind political author Corey Robin pretends to analyse the psychopathology which drives conservatives to think and act the way they do. I say
Do you fancy playing God? Well now’s your chance. This week I’m offering one of you a unique proposition: you get to decide what happens to the rest of my life. Not just my life but, more importantly, the lives of Girl, Boy and the Fawn. (But not the Rat: he’s OK, he has grown
One of my resolutions this year is to make a lot more money. But how? In fact, I’ve noticed recently, it’s very simple: all you have to do is take a popular character with enormous worldwide brand recognition (e.g., King Arthur, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) and shamelessly reinvent him for the youth demographic. So, for
My predictions for 2012 1. After the Arab Spring and the Islamist Winter will come Armageddon Summer. It might happen as early as spring but that season has been bagged already. At Islington dinner parties, on the BBC and in the Guardian — after cursory acknowledgement has been made of all the dead innocents —
A friend of mine called Mike Peyton had what he modestly describes in his memoirs as an ‘average war’. It included having his battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers overrun and wiped out in the Western Desert; nearly starving to death in an Italian POW camp; witnessing the bombing of Dresden; escaping from his camp
I honestly didn’t realise I’d been to a ‘minor’ public school until my first term at Christ Church. Before that, I thought — as all of us did at my alma mater — that though of course there were lots of other public schools out there, Malvern could hold its head high with the very