Margaret Mitchell is The Spectator’s assistant social media editor.
On a grey autumn morning, the apples in the National Fruit Collection look vivid. They pile up in pyramids of carmine, salmon and golden-orange around dwarf trees, which have been bred to human proportions. Their branches are well within reach but picking fruit is forbidden. These trees are part of the world’s largest fruit gene
Former US vice president Dick Cheney died last night aged 84. He arrived in Washington as a congressman for Wyoming, then became secretary for defence under George H.W. Bush and served for eight years as George W. Bush’s vice president. He was considered by many to have pulled the strings behind the Bush administration. Throughout
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The Best of Notes on… gathers the funniest, sharpest and most wonderfully random pieces from The Spectator’s beloved miscellany column. For more than a decade, these short, sharp essays have uncovered the intrigue in the everyday and the delight in digression. To purchase the book, go to spectator.co.uk/shop On this special episode of Spectator Out Loud, you can hear from:
At the receptionist’s desk in Cosprop’s studio and costume warehouse, a former Kwik Fit garage, the sloping bleakness of Holloway Road is held at bay by a small chandelier, brassy lighting and a bound guest book. It’s a bit stagey, like a filmset for a cheap foreign hotel or an expensive shrink’s office, quite out
Ivan Day pulls out an old Habsburg cookbook from his library. The 300-year-old volume is so thick it’s almost a perfect cube, and by some miracle the spine remains intact as he opens it. ‘It’s like a big Harry Potter spellbook,’ he jokes while flicking through drawings of pastry baked in the shapes of dolphins,
Vatican City In an auditorium just outside St Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, sat solemnly in the front row as a young crowd sang, danced and hopped around to a pop hymn. The cardinal, who is 70, was widely expected to become the pope earlier this year. Instead, he inaugurated
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Simmons argues that Trump is winning the tariff war with China; Kapil Komireddi reviews Robert Ivermee’s Glorious Failure: The Forgotten History of French Imperialism in India; Margaret Mitchell watches a Channel 4 documentary on Bonnie Blue and provides a warning to parents; David Abulafia provides his notes on
Channel 4’s documentary begins as the ‘adult content creator’ Bonnie Blue (real name: Tia Billinger, 26, Derbyshire) prepares to beat the world record of men shagged in 12 hours. Spoiler: she beats it, raising the bar to 1,057, though she was a bit nervous that no one would show up. You might wish to see
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First up: how the Bank of England wrecked the economy Britain’s economy is teetering on the brink of a deep fiscal hole, created by billions of pounds of unfunded spending – never-ending health promises, a spiralling welfare bill and a triple lock on the state pension, which will cost three times as much as originally
Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of
In the depths of winter last year, an ice cream and wine bar opened in Islington. The Dreamery serves ice creams and sorbets in silver goblets with tiny vintage spoons. On the ceiling is a glowing mural of happy cows and a sun with a face, resembling a child’s finger-painting (the artist is Lucy Stein,
Is Claude your confidant? Is ChatGPT your yes-man? Your wingman? Artificial intelligence seems more like a friend than the apex predator we feared. Maybe it’s not gearing up to enslave us or turn us into paperclips after all. But I find there is something just as malign about AI posing as our friend. Slowly, subtly, politely,
There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with objects and must guess if they’re edible or not. Is that a dish sponge – or a steamed sponge cake? I might not consider afternoon tea to be art, but the confectionery artifice required to
Last week, the London restaurant St John opened reservations for a celebration of its 30th birthday. For much of September, the Smithfield restaurant will bring back its 1994 menu at 1994 prices. Tables were snatched up within minutes, possibly seconds. I sat at my computer refreshing the OpenTable booking site like a monkey at a
It’s great having toilets with warm seats that shoot water up your bum until you need somewhere to throw up. After eating two kilos of raw, vengeful tuna, I was leaning over a hotel loo in Osaka and all I wanted was to rest my clammy forehead on a cold plastic seat. Six hours earlier,
The moral absolutist in me believes that in every city, with its finite number of restaurants, there is such a thing as the best of all possible lunches. I don’t have to find it, but I have to get close. Mediocre doesn’t cut it. In fact, on holiday, the idea of wasting a meal on
Joe Biden has a cold. That was the desperate message sent out by sources close to the president halfway through Thursday night’s painful debate. Biden’s sick-note recalls the first televised debate in 1960, when the incumbent vice president and Republican nominee Richard Nixon, recently hospitalised and still recovering from a staph infection, appeared pale and sickly
Prius owners are always demanding more legislation against drink driving, but an advantage of living in America is that if you are too trashed to drive home, your 15-year-old kid can pick you up from the bar. The only problem with this is that we Americans love reckless driving too much to let anyone else
In the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, just inland of Utah Beach on the coast of Normandy, a crowd had gathered before an outdoor projector to watch the British, French and American heads of state pay respects to those who served and the thousands who gave their lives on D-Day. While the dancing and drinking and celebration
Last month, Botswana’s Minister for Environment and Tourism Dumezweni Mthimkhulu threatened to send 10,000 elephants to Hyde Park. This week, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi went a step further and suggested sending 20,000 elephants to Germany. These are strange and not entirely plausible threats, yet they reflect the frustration that Botswanan politicians feel over
