Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
In 2005 my seventh novel, about an unloving mother tortured by whether her son’s high-school mass murder was all her fault, designated me the go-to girl for commentary about school shootings. Consequently, the overweight, tremulous, flush-faced Jennifer Crumbley belongs to me. Known for arguably overloaded character names, I couldn’t have invented a better surname for
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Last week Donald Trump was ordered to pay more than seventy million dollars to E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of sexual assault. Freddy speaks to Spectator columnist Lionel Shriver about some of the oddities of this case against the former president.
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On this week’s episode, Lionel Shriver asks if Donald Trump can get a fair trial in America (00:39), Angus Colwell speaks to the Gen-Zers who would fight for Britain (08:25), Matthew Parris makes the case for assisted dying (13:15), Toby Young tells the story of the time he almost died on his gap year (20:43),
I’m an unlikely defender of Donald Trump. Politically, he’s not my boy. Most of the former president’s hyperbolic rants make me cringe. Yet last week, I had to agree with DT that a jury’s award of $83.3 million of his assets to E. Jean Carroll for defamation was ‘absolutely ridiculous’. Keeping track of all the cases
Pundits these days often warn that America may be on the brink of civil war. Finally, they’re right – except that in tiny Eagle Pass, Texas, forget being on the brink. In microcosm, civil war is already under way. Once again playing immigration hardball, last week the Texas governor Greg Abbott, the vile, heartless Republican
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This week: can anyone stop Trump? The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray takes a look at Trump’s ‘second coming’ in his cover story. He says that despite Trump’s legal troubles, he is almost certain to receive the Republican nomination. Freddy joins the podcast alongside Amber Duke, who also writes in the magazine this week about the
Over a leg of lamb, I joined five other expat Americans for Christmas. Our topic du jour was which faction in our homeland we were most afraid of. Revisiting that boisterous conversation appeals, because in this re-enactment, I’m the only one who gets to talk. With forbidding rapidity, one armchair assertion has gone from audacious
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On this week’s episode, Peter Hitchens remembers a Christmas in Bucharest, Lionel Shriver says people don’t care about Ukraine anymore, Ed West wonders if you can ‘meme’ yourself into believing in God, Mary Wellesley reads her ‘Notes On’ St Nicholas, and Melissa Kite says she had to move to Ireland to escape the EU‘s rules.
Apologies for this seasonal downer. Had the website such a listing, this column would surely soar to number one in The Spectator’s ‘Least Popular’ roster. For just now, few topics are a bigger turn-off than Ukraine. Following Russia’s invasion, I got caught up in the same waves of emotion that washed over most western publics,
This week: Katy Balls on what the Elgin Marbles row is really about (00:56); Lionel Shriver on feckless politicians when it comes to immigration (06:43) and Marcus Walker on his rage against multi-faith prayer rooms (15:37).
I’m fascinated by the subject of immigration because I’m a sucker for moral complexity. For decades, too, I’ve been an immigrant myself, though I’ve played by the rules (at some cost), and I’ve never been a burden on the state (to the contrary). Besides, I am by nature territorial. Even having perfectly agreeable house-sitters in
In public events, I’ve sometimes given an unexpectedly appreciative nod to the hard left. It’s laudable, I allow, to stick up for the disadvantaged. Young people naturally hope to revamp the creaky, hypocritical institutions they inherit, just as my generation did in the 1960s. Fairness – a more complex concept than it first appears –
Much misfortune the woebegone couldn’t have seen coming: a raging fire in the house next door that spreads to yours. The invention of some kooky technology called ‘the internet’ that puts your travel agency out of business. Yet other calamities are foreseeable. If you suddenly stop filing tax returns without a good excuse – like,
It’s a truism that the Anglosphere has developed a ‘tribalism’ that rivals the divisions between the Kikuyu and Luhya in Kenya. One pernicious aspect of mutually hostile groupsterism is prix fixe politics. Your side shares a rigid, prescribed collection of beliefs, and joining the club entails embracing every single one, while despising a compulsory roster
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This week: Katy Balls writes in her cover piece that after Tory conference the battle lines have now been drawn between the two main parties. She says we should prepare for a ‘presidential campaign’ ahead of the 2024 election and joins the podcast alongside The Spectator’s editor Fraser Nelson to discuss the dividing lines between Labour and
I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by tippling towers of cardboard, once more unable to put my hands on a black marker when I bought a whole box or to locate a tape gun when we have bloody four of them, in
This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family did, a lightly populated state smack in the centre of the US, and breadbasket to the world. Its rolling hills, panoramic skies and cornfields stippling to the horizon exude what I can only call wholesomeness.
The Texas Supreme Court just upheld a state law banning so-called gender-affirming care for minors, to explosive consternation from predictable quarters. Progressive commentators portray this and similar laws passed by more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures as ‘anti-LGBTQIA+’. In truth, the laws are aimed not at that whole bramble of capital letters, but solely
Were I to overcome a lifelong scepticism about the healing powers of talk therapy, I imagine languishing on a psychiatrist’s divan and whimpering something along these lines: ‘All this “woke” stuff – I’ve even come to hate the word. Resisting its idiocies is taking over my life. I worry that I’m not setting my own
In an outstanding article in the New York Times, Roger Cohen recounted his experience of travelling across Russia for a full month, and hats off to the veteran journalist for risking a shared cell with the Wall Street Journal ‘spy’ Evan Gershkovich. Cohen explains that Vladimir Putin is successfully flogging his war in Ukraine to
