Matthew Parris is a columnist for The Spectator and The Times.
Every so often one reads in the Times or the Daily Telegraph an obituary of an old warrior that simply leaps from the page. A heroic rescue mission in the second world war, an escape by tunnelling, Burma, Kenya, Aden, a secret journey to Lhasa disguised as a yak-herder, and that’s just the military stuff.
It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire. Though
Matthew Parris says Mayor Johnson must now focus obsessively on fixing London’s transport system In more ways than one, the suffix ‘ism’ is not easily appended to the word ‘Boris’. Indeed ‘Borisism’ sounds so ungainly that some may pray that no such phenomenon ever needs to be described. If so, the prayer has been answered.
Two small professional duties, and as much pleasures as duties, have recently overlapped in an unexpected way. I’ve read a colleague’s book on genetics; and I’ve recorded a BBC programme on the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung. I know of no evidence that Jung took a close interest in genetics; and I imagine a typical modern geneticist
What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years
When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now. This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension
At this rate, the throne might as well be replaced by a diamanté wheelchair Why do most parents who leave an inheritance leave it to their children? Why, when most people are well past middle age when their parents die, is this still considered the norm? Now that we live about a generation longer than
Some time ago I was in a room containing perhaps half a dozen other adults, a cat on a sofa-arm, and a baby in a carry-cot far from where I was sitting. The air was filled with the noise of general conversation. I had a cold. I coughed. The baby almost jumped out of its
Like skaters on a lake’s frozen surface, we are sometimes reminded how thin is the crust of philosophical confidence on which our systems of political economy rest. Two years ago we were mostly agreed that free market economics had won the ancient argument between capitalism and the planned economy. Two years ago the case for
I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings
The gay lobby should rejoice at the Pope’s argument that God makes us the way we are I have been puzzling during the winter holidays over Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas message. You may remember that it was interpreted as an attack on homosexuality, provoking the usual outrage. Most people, it seems, saw the response. Few
A splendid Spectator 180th anniversary issue was published this year. Along with many readers, I fell upon a treasury of previously published columns: a selection of examples through the magazine’s history of the wit, erudition and style of contributors since 1828. We found pieces by Graham Greene, John Buchan and Bernard Levin; letters from George
To understand the true nature of history, let us start with the question of Napoleon’s piles Cometh the hour, cometh the piles? Well, Wellington called Waterloo ‘the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’, and on the morning of battle, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus
Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy,
Kookaburras don’t really laugh, but I can see why the old song suggests it: a weird, taunting call, which does have a kind of dark comicality about it. And this is one of the sounds that wake me each morning in Hunters Hill — where I find that The Spectator now has an Australian edition.
Wherever the civilised English gather to discuss the state we’re in, it is almost axiomatic to allow that we’re getting less refined. Discourse, public and private, is (we tell each other) getting cruder; wit is duller; our culture is dumbing down. A vulgarity and obviousness is gaining ground over the art of delicate suggestion. Nowhere
Dramatis personae: Joe Citizen (a citizen) Jack and Jill Jones (Joe’s neighbours) Mr Whatam-Ibid (a surveyor) Mr Ballpark-Estimate (a valuer) Ms Dreamhomes (an estate agent) Mr Moneybags (a small banker) Mr Dollarsacks (a global fund manager) Mr Brown
I find Miliband’s fridge and its contents more interesting than the Foreign Secretary Did you see David Miliband’s fridge? It was massive. I saw it in a photograph in a Times magazine article about the brainy young Foreign Secretary. The pictures were intended to illustrate the would-be Prime Minister’s human side, but the fridge was
In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia. Not that I am
For five years I served on the Broadcasting Standards Council, and there I encountered a riddle whose resolution has eluded me. The BSC has passed into history. Its function was really just to exist, and by existing to provide politicians and broadcasters with a plausible answer to complaints of the kind made by the late