Vicar
The Spectator
Friday
Alice 2
Alice in Poundland
Baby 2
‘Ah, his first word.’
Cavemen
‘A wheel? You’ll be needing this...’
Trains 2
‘My train set was broken by Boxing Day.’
Sky
‘I need more sky to blot out’
Van
‘We’ve been stripped of our double “A” status.’
Turbine 2
‘Thank goodness they’re going to stop the spread of wind turbines over the countryside.’
Hyenas
Murdoch
Economy
‘It’s also a triple-peak recession.’
Map
Letters | 28 December 2012
Distinguished Wardens Sir: Contrary to Dennis Sewell’s statement (‘Assault on the Ivory Tower’, 15/22 December), Wadham College did not ‘elect’ John Wilkins to be Warden in 1647 after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. Rather, Parliamentary Commissioners sacked the royalist Warden and almost all the Fellows and Scholars and imposed Wilkins as the new Warden,
Barometer | 28 December 2012
Counting the years 2013 might look an uninteresting number for a year but it is in fact a mathematical rarity: a year whose digits, when rearranged, can form a simple arithmetic progression: i.e. 0,1,2,3. — The last such year was 1432. The next will be 2031, after which we will have to wait until 2103
Portrait of the week | 28 December 2012
Home Banks should erect a protective ring-fence round their high-street operations, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards recommended, and moreover it should be ‘electrified’. The metaphor meant that regulators should have the power to break up banks that misbehaved. The ten members of the commission included the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, and
Unholy war
To attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve in parts of Nigeria is to take your life in your hands. For the last three years, Islamist militants have been attacking churches but last week, when gunmen moved on a church in Potiskum, they found the military waiting. On their retreat, they came across a smaller unprotected
Hunting with the Heythrop
In this week’s issue of The Spectator, Melissa Kite joins David Cameron’s local hunt, the Heythrop, to find out what its members think of its recent drubbing in the courts from the RSPCA, and the Conservative Party’s troubled relationship with fox hunting. She meets former huntsman Julian Barnfield, who was fined £1,000 in the case,
The Spectator’s books of 2012, pt 2
2012 is very nearly finished. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Matthew Parris There’s been a fad for publishing ‘biographies’ of entities that are not human beings: everything from longitude to the mosquito, and the format can prove forced. But Robert Shepherd’s Westminster,
Thursday
The Spectator’s books of 2012, pt 1
2012 is drawing to a close. Here is a selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. A.N.Wilson Sidney Chambers and the Shadow of Death by James Runcie (Bloomsbury, £14.99). At last, an Anglican Father Brown. Runcie has sensibly set his detective stories in the 1950s, before the
Wednesday
Washing up is therapeutic and dishwashers are socialist
It’s Boxing Day. Your kitchen worktops are groaning under piles of plates, roasting dishes, pans and champagne glasses. If you’re struggling to persuade anyone in your house to fill the sink with hot soapy water, you should first hand them a copy of Mark Mason’s piece in the Christmas issue of the Spectator, ‘The tao
