Clarissa Tan, who wrote articles and TV reviews for The Spectator, has died of cancer aged 42. She came to London from Singapore after winning this magazine’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing and over the next seven years wrote about a great many things: Asia, race and the East; also smartphones, Sienna and socks. Clarissa paid attention to prose and all her pieces were beautiful and funny but, perhaps most unusually, they rang true. She was much loved by all at The Spectator and we miss her. Here is her prize-winning piece.
I wish to write about a place of which I know everything yet nothing, where everything is familiar yet strange, a place where I feel I go too often, but never quite enough. This place is the same for everyone, only different.
It is called, of course, Home — not the Home where you now live, but the Home where you were born and in which all things must start.
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In 2008, under the UK’s Labour government, Israeli politician Moshe Feiglin – a Likud central committee member – was denied entry into Britain. Then home secretary Jacqui Smith cited public safety concerns, quoting Feiglin’s provocative articles and speeches as justification. There was no court appeal available to him, no diplomatic immunity by virtue of his
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