From ‘Friendship and the War’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: WE are all losing our friends. This is true in a tragic sense, because our friends are dying in battle. But there is a lighter sense in which it is true also, and which is also connected with the war. There is so much work to be
From ‘The Possibilities of Thrift’, The Spectator, 10 April 1915: IT has, perhaps, not yet been sufficiently realized that the country is passing through what may almost be called an economic revolution. Large numbers of the working classes who, let it be frankly admitted, were often underpaid are now in receipt of incomes which, in
‘I don’t like the look of this.’
‘They seemed to drink all the time in those days.’
‘The swamp, the swamp, always we go to the swamp. Why can’t we head north this year?’
‘When I was your age we had to make our own porn.’
‘You laughing hyenas at the back, why don’t you just come out here to the front and then we can all share the joke?’
‘You were right – it’s not the cat.’
‘It’s not working, Raymond — I feel like you’re judging me.’
‘Let’s promise everyone a pay rise twice the rate of inflation!’
‘According to our records, you only have two full-time jobs.’
‘For God’s sake, let me get drunk first!’
‘Or this is the election model — it features both a spin cycle and a counter-spin cycle.’
‘Oh no — he’s being difficult again.’
‘When did you last see your feet?’
In defence of Catholicism Sir: Michael Gove gives an excellent defence of Christianity (4 April), but his embarrassment about the Roman Catholic part of the story is unnecessary. He writes of his discomfort as, declaring oneself to be a Christian, ‘You stand in the tradition of the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits who made South
The Scottish way of death Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP would block a rise in the state pension age on the grounds that it would be unfair to Scots, who don’t live as long as the English. — The idea that the Scots die early was fuelled by a study by the Glasgow Centre for
The age of two-party politics is over: we know that because everyone keeps saying so. We are entering an era of coalitions, apparently, where compromise is king and a wider variety of views will be represented in parliament. These barely comprehensible seven-way television debates are the future, we are assured, and decisive general election results