Sam Leith is literary editor of The Spectator.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that the Royal Society of Literature (founded 1820) might be one of those institutions that chugs on benignly year in year out with nothing to disturb the peace of its members. But on Thursday morning, a letter in the Times Literary Supplement, got up as I understand it by Jeremy Treglown and
I don’t, I freely admit, remember all that much about my chemistry lessons at school. Covalent bonding delighted me not, no, nor moles neither. But I do recall being absolutely thrilled the first time I saw paper chromatography. The idea was – I expect I’m getting this slightly wrong, but don’t write in – that
‘Skins gambling,’ anyone? No, until yesterday, me neither. It’s nothing to do with strip poker or 70s bovver boys. It’s the name given to a completely unregulated gambling industry, aggressively promoted to teenagers and estimated to be worth multiple billions of pounds a year – yes, billions with a b. One reason this isn’t a
‘If you can take the lift, why go through the hardest route?’ a recruitment officer representing four Russell Group universities asked an undercover reporter for the Sunday Times. He boasted that ‘foundation’ course pathways onto undergraduate courses at Russell Group universities are much easier than the entry requirements for British applicants: overseas applicants ‘pay more money […]
Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet
Katharine Birbalsingh is back in the papers again. The head teacher at Michaela, a free school whose outstanding academic record and ultra-strict behaviour policy have made it a culture-wars lightning rod, tells the Sunday Times that she and her staff have been getting death threats ever since her board of governors imposed a policy banning any
‘They’ve turned one of our most important pieces of national infrastructure into an internet café,’ was how my friend Marcus, a scholar of early modern literature, put it to me, talking about the cyberattack that crashed the British Library at the end of last year. He’s not wrong. Since October, when a ransomware attack by the Rhysida criminal
Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. This is
My wife argues with the children about video games. I argue with the children about video games. The children argue with each other about video games. Consequently, I argue with my wife about video games. It is a total nightmare – and it’s one that in various versions will be replicated in houses with young
You can’t turn on the telly or fire up the internet these days without stumbling across some celebrity or other baring their soul in a glossily produced documentary. Three hours, was it, of David Beckham – taking us from talented nipper playing keepy-uppy to grizzled paterfamilias wiping down his barbecue in wistful retirement? Or Renaissance: A Film, which showed Beyonce
Christmas cards are the pits, aren’t they? A positive engine of seasonal ill-will. They take hours to do, if you do them properly, and wing across the country (and have you checked the price of a stamp lately?) to be received by people you like but don’t see, or people you see but don’t like
Newsnight, we learned last week, is losing ten minutes off its running time, more than half its staff including its entire reporting team and is dropping its investigative films in favour of cheap ‘n’ easy studio-based debates. The BBC’s news supremo Deborah Turness calls it ‘an important BBC brand’, but said ‘we’ve made the decision to reformat Newsnight as a 30-minute late-night
It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would ‘put the UK at the heart of a group of some of the world’s most dynamic economies’, will boost our economy by practically nothing at all. The OBR reckons CPTPP will put 0.04 per cent
This summer, horrified by the rising numbers of students no-platforming and harassing visiting speakers whose views they don’t like, the government anointed the Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed ‘free speech tsar’. Prof Ahmed said at the time that his new role, at least as he saw it, wasn’t a culture wars stunt: he was interested in protecting free expression
In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on itself (am I getting this right, Carlo?) … and then keeps collapsing, over and over again, until it becomes infinitely tiny and inside-out and even the rules of physics cease to apply. This applies to
The foul-mouthed puppet musical Avenue Q, way back in 2003, caught the spirit of the age to come. ‘The internet is for porn!/ The internet is for porn!’ runs one of its more memorable songs. ‘Why do you think the net was born?/ Porn! Porn! Porn!’ Never was a truer word sung by a copyright-skirting knockoff of The Muppet
One of the consistent themes of Dominic Cummings’s kamikaze mission to reform the machinery of the British state was that we urgently needed more politicians with backgrounds in science, maths and engineering, and fewer with 2:1s in PPE. As he argued, the latter sort (see also: historians like Dom, classicists like Boris Johnson and pompous
Alex Kaplo lives, apparently, the life of Riley. The 31-year-old’s website shows him roaring around in a Mercedes, and he boasts of taking ‘extravagant’ holidays and living in a high-end apartment. He has made all his dosh, as it turns out, as a ‘publishing chief executive’. He has caused hundreds of books to be released,
‘Hi Jacques,’ I say as the publisher of Fitzcarraldo Editions appears on my Zoom screen with his Franz Hals facial hair. ‘Thanks for making the time.’ I explain, apologetically but cheerily, that I’m going to be asking him to give his basic ‘how I keep winning Nobel Prizes’ spiel – at which, I say, he’s
Qui tacet consentire videtur: who keeps silent is seen to consent. That Latin tag haunts the western response to the situation in Israel. We’re already seeing, amid the rage and grief, people being called out for what they don’t say as much as for what they do. But what are those of us – the
