Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive today whom I especially admire? I couldn’t think of anyone I held in high esteem who wasn’t dead. Either I was surrounded by mediocrities, or I was an ungenerous, withholding jerk. I’m pleased to discover
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In this week’s episode: Is the current NHS crisis a bug or a feature? In the Spectator’s cover story this week, our economics editor Kate Andrews writes about the state of the NHS and why even though reform is so clearly needed it’s nearly politically impossible to try to do so. She joins the podcast
Comparing Saturday’s Downing Street press conference to Groundhog Day would insult one of my favourite films. The hilarious, multifarious strategies our cinematic protagonist employs to repeatedly negotiate the same day in February are anything but monotonous. No. 10’s top-down strategies for containing Covid are always the same. That press conference seemed like a cheap Chinese
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On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Katy Balls on the political power of Angela Rayner. (00:49) Then Lionel Shriver on the unscientific divisions between the vaxxed and unvaxxed. (06:52) And finally, Nick Newman looks at the differences between British and American cartooning. (15:47) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes
When a column highlighting under-appreciated breaking news has had absolutely no impact on the course of events (per usual), the urge to make the same point again is irresistible. In August, Public Health England released data which shows that vaccination does not appreciably guard against Covid infection and transmission and protection worked out at around
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On this week’s episode, we’ll hear from Lionel Shriver on how the Biden Administration’s border policies are a gift for Trump and the Republicans. (00:52) Then Kit Wilson on what we can expect from Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. (09:53) Third, it’s Peter Hanington talking about his love of haikus. (18:48) And finally, Robert Porter’s notes on
For Democrats, like the ‘insurrection’ of January 6th, the Trump policy of separating illegal-immigrant parents from their children in 2018 has been the political gift that’s kept on giving ever since. In 2020, the conspicuously inhumane protocol provided a rallying cry for candidates in the primaries and later for Biden as nominee. True, the policy
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On this week’s episode, we’ll hear Douglas Murray on how the Prevent scheme has lost sight of its founding intention. (00:43) Then Owen Matthews on Rome’s rubbish. (12:35) And finally, Lionel Shriver gives her review of Dave Chappelle’s transgressive new Netflix Special. (19:20) Produced and presented by Sam Holmes
I’m accustomed to a sense of urgency in relation to Netflix offerings because the streaming service often buys short-term rights that abruptly run out. But this time, I rushed to see Dave Chappelle’s new stand-up special The Closer lest Netflix’s own disgruntled employees succeed in getting the performance taken down. Strictly speaking, the affronted staff
Trends in New York City tend to foretell trends in London, whose fashions in turn set the pace for smaller British cities. After a summer in the Apple, I can therefore provide British urbanites with a glimpse of their future. I get around on what I newly perceive as a dumpy, sluggish pushbike. Mayor Bill
This last weekend I attended the memorial service for my father, who died in July. This isn’t a bid for sympathy. Everyone’s father dies; most of us expect to suffer our bereavements in private; you didn’t know him. But in a larger sense, this is a bid for sympathy. That is, sympathy for us all.
It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary goal of the original aerial assault in 2001 was clear and primitive: revenge. Not always a dish best served cold. That military operation was an attempt to satisfy public thirst for payback, and also for
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On this week’s episode, we’ll be taking a look at the fortress that Australia has built around itself, and ask – when will its Zero Covid policy end (01:00)? Also on the podcast: is it racist to point out Britain’s changing demographics (14:35)? And is trivia just another way for men to compete (27:00)? With
PODCAST: Lionel Shriver discusses this column with Dr Remi Adekoya in our The Edition podcast. Listen here. The Afghans the Home Office is scrambling to resettle in Britain present one of immigration’s most sympathetic cases: translators and other support workers for allied troops whose lives are potentially imperilled by Taliban revenge against collaborators. Councils are searching for
12 Sept 2021: Health Secretary Sajid Javid has announced that the government is shelving its plans to introduce mandatory domestic vaccine passports (details here). Below is Lionel Shriver’s column from August 2021, in which she argues vaccine passports were always a bad tool for tackling Covid-19. Despite having mocked app-happy Albion in my last column, I finally
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This week we’ll hear Charlotte Eagar on how the arrival of the alpha migrants may be the solution to our labour shortage (00:56), Lionel Shriver on her bewilderment about people still having the Covid app (07:09) and finally Tom Ough’s brief history of bidets (15:40).
As I begin, I’m tortured by the doo-do-doo-do of The Twilight Zone’s theme music. I’ve hurtled back in time. Suddenly I’m a wise-ass, liberty-loving journalist who’s had it up to my eyeballs with intrusive, ineffectual top-down nanny-ism, and I’m pooping on yet another pitiful feint at ‘doing something’ by the lumbering big state. OK, check.
Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants that journalists cite as living in the US never changes. For years on end, I’ve read that the population of America’s ‘undocumented’ — a euphemism that seems to upbraid the receiving country’s bureaucrats for failing
Journalists filing to deadline are apt to dig only so deep when googling for statistics, which in themselves are sometimes derided as worse than damned lies. Thus we’re often suckers for ‘known facts’. Besides, if the UK’s Office for National Statistics doesn’t produce reliable data, where’s a poor scribbler to turn? Nevertheless, the current uptake
During the political car crash of 2019, I couldn’t imagine ever agreeing with Theresa May. Yet last week she exhibited both principle and pragmatism — qualities sorely lacking in her capitulation to the conniving EU paradigm whereby Northern Ireland made Brexit supposedly insoluble. The legacy of that surrender, Ulster’s disastrously unworkable trade protocol, will wait
