Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a columnist can do for a readership is to read the source. Friends, you owe me. I will expect flowers and chocolate. For I have located Public Health England’s ‘Beyond the Data: Understanding the impact of
When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction was pretty standard. My eyes bugged. I stood up. I exclaimed something like: ‘Bloody hell!’ We’ve all seen the video dozens of times now, but it’s worth clinging to that initial shock, the better to
24 min listen
Hear Katy Balls on the long term impact of the Cummings affair; Dr John Lee on the problem with the way we are counting Covid deaths; and Lionel Shriver on how life isn’t worth living without a little risk. Get a month’s free trial of The Spectator and a free wireless charger here.
Taking my life in my hands — as we all do when getting out of bed — I walked along the Thames last week. On the northern footpath east of Blackfriars Bridge, a young man ran atop the adjacent wall and jumped across a gap in the brickwork. The gap was six feet long, the
Should our future permit an occupation so frivolous, historians years from now will make a big mistake if they blame the nauseating plummet of global GDP in 2020 directly on a novel coronavirus. After all — forgive the repetition, but certain figures bear revisiting — Covid’s roughly 290,000 deaths wouldn’t raise a blip on a
Under the cloud of conformity that has settled over the land as a replacement for air pollution, heretics who doubt the wisdom of annihilating a nation in the name of saving it are obliged to navigate around numerous disputational booby traps. You hate old people and want them to die (though some oddballs questioning the
Last week, a friend quoted a two-year-old email of mine: ‘I’m starting to root for a plague or world war to purify western culture, burning to cinders all the petty, neurotic, witch-hunting cliques with the white heat of real problems.’ Depressed by my own foresight, I wrote back: ‘The trouble with this solution is that
I am a type. I don’t like groups. I maintain few memberships. I question and resist authority, especially enforcement of rules for the rules’ sake. I’m leery of orthodoxy. I hold back from shared cultural enthusiasms. Everyone’s met such obstreperous specimens — the original self-isolators — and some readers out there are just like me.
20 min listen
Matthew Parris warns against comparing coronavirus to the war, Lionel Shriver fears the economic repercussions, and Isabel Hardman explains why stockpiling hens isn’t such a good idea.
Comically, Chinese Communist party officials have speculated that Covid-19 was planted by the US army. Yet a respectable conspiracy theorist would deduce that a virus sending the rest of the world into an hysterical, wholesale economic shutdown has ‘Made in China’ written all over it. After all, China didn’t flat-line its entire economy to contain
Even amid plague, economic apocalypse, and the cancellation of 2020, dumb stuff keeps happening. Besides, loads of us will now beeline for any column not about coronavirus. Key words: Hachette, Woody Allen. See also: Douglas Murray. This isn’t the first time we’ve agreed on something. American publishing has hardly covered itself in glory regarding Woody
I’ve put off sending a private email that’s been ready to go for weeks. Then last Sunday, I read Julie Burchill’s column in the Telegraph about the rigid ideological conformism amidst today’s purportedly ‘creative’ class, and it hit a nerve. Despite our sanctification of inclusivity and diversity, Burchill wrote, ‘exclusivity and groupthink still control the
Most Britons assume at the outset that any misfortune involving a cyclist is the cyclist’s fault. After all, many a two-wheeled hellion has earned contempt. But put aside the understandable cynicism. This is not one of those stories. A week ago, I was cycling around Buckingham Palace while some low-key royal whatnot was pending but
Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan) exactly what Shriver will write about this week. Maybe it’s hard to pity Jeanine Cummins. Her third novel, American Dirt, secured a seven-figure advance, an Oprah Book Club pick and a huge publicity campaign (waste
Should Bernie Sanders become the Democratic presidential nominee, expect the media to overuse these sprightly English expressions: ‘between a rock and a hard place’, ‘between the devil and the deep blue sea’, ‘on the horns of a dilemma’ and ‘Morton’s fork’. After all, you wouldn’t call a Trump vs Sanders race a ‘Hobson’s choice’, which
One of the more dispiriting experiences of the British supermarket is a visit to the fish counter. On a historically seagoing island, the selection is often abysmal, frequently imported, and always expensive: farmed Norwegian salmon, farmed Vietnamese basa (blech), cod gone a suspicious taupe and priced like its weight in saffron (83 per cent of
It seems seasonably suitable to celebrate good news. Unfortunately, as in most serviceable stories, for something good to happen, something bad had to happen first. Though we’ve only been in sporadic touch since, I met Kevin Myers three decades ago at a boozy lunch in Dublin. He was already a journalistic institution. By his own
The pressure group Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) is oddly named. What their campaign opposes is pension equality. Now, technically these activists born in the 1950s do not object to equalising the pension ages of men and women, so long as said activists don’t personally have to sacrifice for gender justice. Supposedly, the problem
In 2019, Labour’s strategy is about delivering a fairer, more prosperous society, in adherence to our motto: for the zany, not the shrewd. Because Labour voters have short attention spans (and therefore do not remember how deeply we got the nation in debt the last time our party was in power), we would like to
Dear Nigel Believe it or not, I’ve been your defender. I’ve often told Americans, ‘Sure, he comes across as a fop. But listen to what he actually says. He’s smarter than you think.’ OK, you have an affect problem. I’ve seen through the clowning. I bet you’ve never been that camp off-camera, and lately you’ve
