Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
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First: Reform is naff – and that’s why people like it Gareth Roberts warns this week that ‘the Overton window is shifting’ but in a very unexpected way. Nigel Farage is ahead in the polls – not only because his party is ‘bracingly right-wing’, but ‘because Reform is camp’. Farage offers what Britain wants: ‘a
True, one of the earliest school shooters, Brenda Spencer, who shot up a playground in San Diego in 1979, was a girl – famously providing the peg for the Boomtown Rats’ hit ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’. But that was a long time ago. Since, American mass shooters have been overwhelmingly male. One would expect, then,
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First: Putin has set a trap for Europe and Ukraine ‘Though you wouldn’t know from the smiles in the White House this week… a trap has been set by Vladimir Putin to split the United States from its European allies,’ warns Owen Matthews. The Russian President wants to make a deal with Donald Trump, but
On reflection, a tradition of shelving many desirable goods within ready reach is extraordinary – especially because the premises in which these wares are invitingly presented provide unfettered access to every passerby. By and large, it’s dead easy to pick up one of these desirable objects – or dozens, should forethought ensure the possession of
During the immigration deluge in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems one Afghan and one Indian national who threw themselves on the mercy of much-besieged Ireland got lost in the shuffle. Fobbed off with €25 vouchers, they were obliged to sometimes sleep rough for two months, without access to food and hygiene
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Deputy US editor Kate Andrews is joined by author and Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver to assess Donald Trump’s turbulent second term. They discuss the rise of socialism in New York, why fairness is warping immigration policy, and whether Trump’s obsession with lawfare and vengeance is undoing his own presidency.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But
The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping up my entertainment end of things, I’ve forwarded the pictures to multiple correspondents myself. See, news stories have been accumulating – and many similar stories doubtless remain unreported – about Muslim immigrants harassing and sexually
Indisputably a nutjob, Chase Strangio is the soul of nominative determinism. The lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union is a ‘trans man’ – meaning a woman, of course; one of the trans movement’s lesser impositions is forcing consumers of pliant media to keep translating wishful thinking into real life, much as the unhip once
The circus around Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – whose full name the New York Times likes to trot out as if citing an old-school English aristocrat – speaks volumes about the immigration battle roiling the US. Our friend Kilmar is what we fuddy-duddies insist on calling an illegal immigrant. The Salvadoran crossed clandestinely into the
Exciting news. To ‘showcase the vibrant diversity of both marine life and the LGBTQ+ community’, the visionary Bristol Aquarium has just announced a one-off tour of non-binary fish. On 28 June, its Sunset Seas exhibit will ‘celebrate love, life and the beauty of being yourself’ by illuminating with brightly coloured lights a collection of creatures
I’ve struggled to ascertain from afar the true nature of Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. Progressive media love to quote its supporters’ politically off-key comments, but no party can answer for a membership’s every daft remark; even the odd dodgy politician comes with the territory. Yet the country’s two mainstream but increasingly unpopular parties – a
I first stuck my neck out on ‘trans’ nearly a decade ago, when a societal obsession with pretending to change sex was already going great guns. I’d been disturbed by this unhinged cultural preoccupation ever since documentaries about little boys in dresses started to glut our television schedules in 2012. I’m not proud of having
Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with our money. After Donald Trump’s erratic tariff tantrums have sent markets lurching, who knows how much stocks will have spiked or tanked between the typing of this paragraph and it seeing print. Some 62 per
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Gavin Mortimer looks at how the French right can still win (1:48); Colin Freeman interviews Americans who have fought in Ukraine and feel betrayed by Trump (11:01); Lawrence Osborne details his experience of last week’s earthquake, as he reads his diary from Bangkok (18:38); Lionel Shriver defends traditional, monogamous marriage
My late parents perpetually promoted their marriage as the best in the history of the universe. Because this cult of two was hardly subtle, others readily detected what they wanted to hear, so fawning social admiration of what lovebirds they were made them even worse. For us kids, this Trumpesque superlative (how they’d hate that
I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in
Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’, I had a queasy sense of recognition. Lawford claims that Vladimir Putin has no real desire for a peace deal in Ukraine, because both his personal political power and his country’s militarised economy depend on
Whatever you think of the blizzard of executive orders howling from the White House, at least the new President doesn’t succumb to the seductive gravitational pull of the status quo. This is therefore a fitting juncture at which to not simply think outside the box, but in some cases to chuck the box. For example,
‘This is an assault!’ I screamed in my study, oblivious to the fact that my husband had a guest downstairs. ‘I’ll never write anything again!’ Thanks to one more helpful word processing ‘update’–which my cousin calls ‘setbacks’– whenever I hazarded a sentence, I suddenly had bossy company: Microsoft 365’s underhandedly money-making ‘Copilot’, when I’ve always
