Society

Thursday

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Don’t ambush parents with activism

As we sat down at the Royal Opera House to watch one of the Royal Ballet’s soloists perform Letter to Tchaikovsky, an announcement began. ‘Tchaikovsky is understood to have been a gay man, who was forced by the conventions of society to marry a woman,’ explained an earnest female voice from off-stage. ‘The music, words and dance describe the pain and guilt he experienced as a closeted queer person… but like many others before and since, the fact that he was queer meant that he had to stay secret about who he really was… It is still illegal to be gay or queer in 69 countries, and queer people continue to

Kate Weinberg

How my father’s bedtime stories shaped my life

It’s half an hour before lights out when my dad arrives at my bedroom door holding Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. He kicks off his shoes, loosens his tie and wedges himself next to me in my small single bed, his toes waggling in their socks as they regain freedom after a long day in the office. In the evening he smells of the menthol toothpicks he always carries in his top pocket (in the morning, when he drops me off at school, he smells of the spicy pink toothpaste which I once tried and which burned the roof of my mouth). I lie with my head

Ali Kefford

Christmas on patrol with the Royal Navy’s submariners

This Christmas, a Royal Navy Trident submarine will be quietly prowling the seas as part of the Continuous At Sea Deterrent mission. She will have slipped out of HM Naval Base Clyde in Scotland in late August. Her location is a secret, known only to a handful of officers aboard. Even the highest ranks of the navy, such as the Chief of Defence Staff and the First Sea Lord, remain unaware of where their ‘bomber’ is. For the rest of the crew, the submarine’s whereabouts are a mystery, with only the temperature of the water against the hull offering them a vague sense of geography. One captain opened a present

Ronald Hutton

How pagan is Christmas?

Many people today feel an ambivalence towards the history of the Christmas festival. They sense that it has deep pre-Christian roots and yet are also aware that most of the actual customs associated with it are relatively modern. The problem is that both views are correct. Most of the current trappings of the season are Victorian inventions or importations: the cards, the tree, the stocking, the turkey and Father Christmas with his reindeer and his sack of presents. Even local seasonal activities which look genuinely primeval have turned out not to be. Most of the season’s trappings are Victorian inventions or importations: the cards, the tree, the stockings The southern

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Negroni inflation is out of control

Forty years ago this Christmas I visited Hong Kong for the first time – a few days after the signing in Beijing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration that sealed the former colony’s transfer to mainland rule in 1997. It was a moment of apprehension, but at least the timetable had been set. And how lucky I was to have experienced that extraordinary outpost as it was then, in such contrast to what China’s masters have made it now. The Christmas Day service in St John’s Cathedral, overhead fans stirring the turbid air, was a poignant glimpse of Hong Kong’s past. Norman Foster’s Hongkong Bank building, the most expensive in the

Olivia Potts Olivia Potts

How to make chocolate salami

For as long as we’ve been serving food, we’ve been unable to resist a bit of culinary deception. Making one thing look like another thing – especially if it makes a sweet thing look savoury or vice versa – seems to have universal comedic value. There’s something Willy Wonka-ish about the visual wrong-footing, the surprise – we find it delightful. I’m not even going to stop you slinging some mini marshmallows in there – it is Christmas, after all There’s a long history here. At medieval and Tudor banquets, the food was entertainment as much as it was sustenance: huge pastries made to look like life-size stags and swans stood

Lisa Haseldine Lisa Haseldine

What carols owe to Martin Luther

It’s 500 years since Martin Luther, along with the preacher Paul Speratus, put together the first Protestant hymn book, the Achtliederbuch, literally the ‘book with eight songs’. Collections of liturgical chants and songs had existed before, but they had never been meant for the congregation – just for choirs. Luther believed collective sung worship in German (as opposed to Latin) was key to spreading the Reformation’s ideas and inspiring converts. What better way to engage worshippers than to include them in the church services they were attending? A catchy, simple melody and words everyone could understand, regardless of status or ability to read, helped too. The Achtliederbuch was very popular

Rory Sutherland and Rick Rubin

‘Judgment is the price of being creative’

Rick Rubin is a legendary American record producer who co-founded Def Jam records, which helped popularise hip hop. He has worked with everyone from Johnny Cash (whose career he is credited with reviving) to Paul McCartney and Kanye West. He sat down with The Spectator’s Rory Sutherland to discuss creativity, Bach, Sherlock Holmes, JFK assassination theories and more. RORY SUTHERLAND: It’s a huge pleasure to see you again. Just for the benefit of older Spectator readers, it’s probably worth defining what a music producer does because it’s ambiguous. People might imagine someone sitting there, adjusting the levels on one of those enormous mixing decks. In fact you never touch any

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why didn’t I read the comments sooner?

I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to guard against misinterpretation. But for me – I doubt this makes me unusual – one scornful put-down has a more lasting effect than ten gushing compliments. Forbidding myself from hitting that bottom tab is a matter of self-protection. While writing, I don’t want to lose my nerve, and too keen an awareness of your (potentially

Bruce Anderson

My bottles of the year

This has been the most fascinating political year I can remember. I have even found myself dreaming about politics – and neither the excitements nor the perils are likely to end any time soon. So it might seem self-indulgent to tear one’s attention away from grog. But we all need distraction, even in the spirit of gaudeamus igitur. Looking back over the year’s drinking, I also decided to summon interesting bottles for a meander through pleasant memories. My friend keeps his politics in the closet for he is a Californian who voted for Trump. He should be put in charge of the White House cellar As he has before, a

Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Something out of a Spectator reader’s dreams: The Guinea Grill reviewed

Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of the Empire at its height in colour – and I found the Guinea Grill in Bruton Place. George VI isn’t a vivid monarch. He lived in the shadow of queens – one Mary, two Elizabeths – and on film he is always crying, or dying. In The Crown (Jared Harris, marvellous) he lost his lung.

Charles Cornish-Dale

How to turn eggnog into a superfood

Recently, scientists were baffled by the discovery that ice cream is a superfood. Yes, that’s right, people who eat ice cream tend to be healthier than those who don’t. A lot healthier. It’s ‘nutrition science’s most preposterous result’, according to the Atlantic. In fact, there’s nothing preposterous about it, if you actually know anything about the ingredients that go into ice cream. You’ve got high-quality milk protein and fat, sugars and a whole lot of vitamins and minerals. The fats make the protein and the vitamins and minerals more bioavailable – meaning you can absorb more – and they slow the digestion of the sugars, so you don’t get a

Andrew O’Hagan

The Andrew problem: a short story

People offended by name-dropping are absolutely no fun. I’ve experimented with this concept on five continents – OK, four: Antarctica’s social whirl isn’t what it might be – and those who roll their eyes at shocking new developments in the world of celebrity are just the worst. Not content with having zero information to offer, they diminish what is given, and in a more efficient world such bores would be carried at high speed to the guillotine. I take my cue in these matters from the great name-droppers of all time, who, in no particular order, are James Boswell, Pope John XXIII, Lee Strasberg, Truman Capote, Nelson Mandela, Andy Warhol,

Roger Alton Roger Alton

The best (and worst) of this year’s sport

It was quite a year for some of the worst of sport – America’s golfers, already among the richest and greediest men on the planet, wanting a massive extra bung to pitch up for the Ryder Cup and, equally noisome, Bill Sweeney, chief executive of the Rugby Football Union, paying himself £1.1 million while announcing a loss of £37.9 million. That salary included a performance-based one-off payment of £358,000. Performance? Well may you ask. As Francis Baron, a former RFU chief, observed sagely: ‘We are paying stellar salaries for junk-bond performances.’ Fair enough in my view, and that’s not even looking at the England rugby team’s less than stellar showing.

William Boyd

The lure of the spy novel

Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film as a director, The Trench. I always think about the film on 11 November, because during the shoot we observed a uniquely different minute’s silence in the labyrinth of trenches we had constructed on a soundstage at Bray Studios in Berkshire. The film follows a squad of young soldiers as they wait, over two fraught days in 1916, for the Battle of the Somme to begin. We paused filming at 11 a.m. and fell silent. I was standing in the frontline trench with a dozen young actors who were all

Melissa Kite

I shouldn’t be allowed to go to church

‘Life is changed, not ended,’ said the slogan on the lectern as the priest told his flock what to think about a difficult subject, with a reassuring smile. ‘It’s quite a big change,’ I whispered to the builder boyfriend who was staring down at his feet in an attempt to stop the allergic response that was welling up. The service was commemorating those who have died this past year in our corner of West Cork, but the overoptimistic way it was being done was making us feel ever so slightly hysterical. I leaned in to the BB: ‘Have you noticed how Mary has got a halo made of the 12

A.N. Wilson

The end of Christendom is nigh

If you are of a traditional turn of mind, you might well go to church this Christmas, sing the carols you knew in childhood and feel a bit of a Dickensian glow. If you are already Christian, the experience will confirm your sense that what is commemorated is the most stupendous thing in human history – the arrival of Jesus Christ, whether or not you believe the stories as told in the readings. Statistically, however, it is highly unlikely that you will be going back to church for months – probably not until next year. If you did venture into your local church on a normal Sunday, you would find

Catriona Olding

What will become of artists who paint?

What hope is there for artists following the sale recently of the robot Ai-Da’s portrait of Alan Turing, entitled ‘A.I. God’, for a cool $1 million? Someone has perhaps paid over the odds for a 3D print with a few marks added by a robotic arm and a few more by studio assistants to areas of the canvas Ai-Da couldn’t reach. Innovation wins. Rather like the art schools which demanded portfolio evidence of artistic ability, AI will stifle talent In the 1970s, the walls of art school degree shows were studded with plaster casts of students’ genitals. By the 1980s, students were discouraged from attempting realist painting, but messy grey abstract

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A Christian revival is under way

This is my second Christmas as a Christian. As an atheist, I had dismissed the bright lights and customs of Christmas as traditions that had evolved to keep our spirits up as the cold of winter creeps in. But the more I learn about, and participate in, the rituals of my adopted faith, the less Grinch-like I become. Christmas isn’t just crass commercialism, it’s vital to a western revival. Celebrating it is more important than ever. The date of 25 December was significant before the birth of Christ of course. It coincided with the Ancient Roman celebration of Winter Solstice, just as 25 March was the Spring Equinox. The 25th

Aidan Hartley

Retracing the steps of slaves in Benin

Ouidah, Benin On a free afternoon in Benin, I decide to walk the slave route in Ouidah, the port from which perhaps a million Africans were transported on the Middle Passage to the Americas. Near the old slave market or Place Chacha, named in memory of the slaver Francisco Félix de Souza, about whom Bruce Chatwin wrote a book, I encounter a group of black Americans following the same path. Now in 1776 – even before the abolitionist Wilberforce – the MP for Hull, David Hartley, was the first to introduce to parliament a debate ‘that the slave trade is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of