The latest challenge was to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style of a well-known author. My, you were good this week — good enough to make being jilted seem quite the thing. Even that most maddening of break-up clichés ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ has a certain charm when
In April each year Sikhs around the world celebrate Vaisakhi. While it marks the Indian spring harvest, the festival has a much deeper significance for adherents of Sikhism – it commemorates the birth of a nation of warrior-saints. Over the weekend some of Britain’s 423,000 plus Sikhs began these festivities with impressive street processions called Nagar Kirtans
Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with yearning of what she had back home and how painful it is to live so far away. I wondered aloud why she and her American husband had emigrated to the United States from that idyllic
Since June 2014, when Islamic State attacked northern Iraq, the desks at Mar Ephrem seminary in Hamdaniya, a city 18 miles southeast of Mosul, have stood empty. Today, they are dusty and rooms once teeming with priests and nuns in training are dark; student ID cards, with titles such as ‘Syrian Catholic: Parish of Bashiqa, Iraq’, litter the floor and a
The Garden Bridge project, loved by Joanna Lumley and no-one else, has been roundly criticised by Dame Margaret Hodge in a report for the Mayor of London. In her review, Hodge says it would be ‘better for the taxpayer to accept the financial loss of cancelling the project’, a perspective that the Garden Bridge Trust
As if Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t already getting it from all sides on the home front, the beleaguered Labour leader has come under a fresh line of an attack from a former Bush aide: propping up Donald Trump. Yes, speaking on The Spectator Podcast, David Frum – senior editor at The Atlantic and former Bush administration staffer – accused
Are you reading this in the departure lounge, en route to an Easter break? If like me you’ve chosen to fly with Ryanair, I suspect you will judge the experience by the ease of airport parking, the length of the security queue and whether they play that fanfare signalling ‘another on-time arrival’. Anything approaching decent
Each Easter, I think of David Jones (1895-1974). He was a distinguished painter and, I would (though unqualified) say, a great poet. There is a new, thorough biography of him by Thomas Dilworth (Cape). A sympathetic review in the Guardian wrestles with why he is not better known: ‘The centrality of religion to Jones’s work
Last Friday, only hours after the terrorist attack in central Stockholm, police found themselves pelted by rocks in the city’s largely immigrant Tensta neighbourhood. The following evening, officers were once again attacked, this time in Hammarkullen in Gothenburg. On Sunday, a familiar story: rioters aimed Molotov cocktails and a fire bomb at police as unrest broke out
With George Osborne set to start his new part-time job as editor of the Evening Standard next month, the former chancellor could be forgiven for taking things easy for now and just focussing on his two other big jobs — as an advisor for Black Rock and the MP for Tatton. However, given that this
Boom! Are you impressed? The US Commander-in-Chief has just dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever on Afghanistan. Why? Well, to kill terrorists, natch, but also because he’s Donald J Trump, and he’ll do what he wants. The new president was clearly heartened by the positive response he received from the usually hostile media to his
As far as I am concerned, British Vogue under its outgoing editor was complacent, borderline racist and lacked taste, therefore the benchmark for what constituted an improvement was heartbreakingly low. Then on Monday, Condé Nast announced that Edward Enninful would be taking the helm. This is probably the closest the UK will get to its Obama moment – an occasion where
I’m not a member of a trade union, but I should be. As a freelance journalist, my employment situation is precarious — yet it still wouldn’t occur to me to join the National Union of Journalists. My reasons are both personal and political, but mostly practical: the NUJ talks tough but, in the end, seldom
On this week’s episode, we discuss the future of Christians as a minority group, consider whether Trump has found an ally in Britain, and dissect the 21st century phenomenon of the ‘flake’. First, with Easter just around the corner, the fate of Christianity in an increasingly secular Britain came under scrutiny. In this week’s magazine cover story, Rod
This article originally appeared in the Spectator in 1991 You are a Spectator reader, an honest, law-abiding, professional with moderate political views. You think you don’t look like a terrorist. Think again. I arrived at Heathrow airport with a good 50 minutes to spare before my scheduled flight to Berlin was due to leave. I
Man, the brass neck of Trump’s media critics. They’ve spent the past 24 hours tearing into Trump’s media man Sean Spicer after he made a stupid, crude Hitler analogy. Which is a bit like Shane MacGowan telling people off for drinking too much. These people have been yelling ‘Hitler!’ for months. From the minute Trump
My guest in this week’s Spectator Books Podcast is Rob Newman. Listeners of a certain age (ie mine) will remember him as a tweedy professor on the spoof History Today upbraiding David Baddiel with the line: “That’s you, that is.” But here he arrives as a real scholar: the author of a provoking (and also funny) new
Are you counting the hours until home time and a glorious four days without work? Join the club. Just think of it – the beautiful British bank holiday, a Spring mini-break, and the chocolate. Oh my lord, the chocolate. New research suggests that the average UK household spends more than £6,000 on chocolate in a
Just as some people can remember where they were when they heard that President Kennedy had been shot, I can still recall where I was when I heard that the state pension age for women was to rise from 60 to 65, incrementally between 2010 and 2020. The year was 1993 and I was standing
The government has made good on its Autumn Statement pledge to introduce a new ‘market-leading’ bond through National Savings & Investments (NS&I) – it’s just a shame the market is still in the doldrums. The Investment Guaranteed Growth Bond will pay 2.2 per cent to savers depositing between £100 and £3,000. Launching the NS&I bond