A fond farewell

To those of you who are discovering our new website: welcome. The aim is for it to be leaner and faster, but in the rejig we have had to drop some items that we’ll miss. One I will particularly miss is Night & Day, the Spectator Arts Blog, which was brilliantly run by Simon Mason and Scott Jordan Harris.

I’d long admired their blog before if became part of The Spectator. Simon was a pioneer of Twitter commissioning, by which he’d he follow writers he likes and, when they expressed a view on arts and books, he’d ask them for a blog. Such is his charm that they usually oblige. He came under our umbrella for very little pecuniary gain, and soon put together an all-star cast for the site, and particularly Night & Day’s excellent Spotify Sunday feature. I personally learned much about what to see, what to listen to, and what to read from the blog — it was on Scott’s recommendation, for instance, that I picked up Clive James’s brilliant autobiography, the best book I read that summer.