Happy birthday to us

Readers may feel they have had almost enough of The Spectator’s 175th anniversary. Enormous and flattering articles have appeared in newspapers, including the Guardian. Spectator staff have been deployed on the airwaves, plugging merrily away. If the thought were not so appalling, one might even wonder whether there were some public-relations campaign, to ‘plant’ favourable items at strategic points in the media landscape. As the festivities come to their peak, routs and revels have been organised, sponsored by diamond companies and attended by Spectator-related celebrities such as Charles Moore and Nigella Lawson. Now, however, by way of a climax, a beautifully produced one-off anniversary edition is on the stands, an anthology of the best journalism of the last 175 years. Any reader’s embarrassment at the PR blitz will surely evaporate as he rushes out to the newsagent to buy, buy, buy this fabulous volume, retailing for less than a fiver (new.spectator.co.uk/175th).