Spectator Life

Spectator Life

An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.

Does it really matter if Grok undresses us all?

I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed. This objective attitude to my own

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The power of the walkout

To walk out of a public performance before the end – be it the theater, a concert or a lecture – is not the done thing. It’s considered an antisocial act that disrupts the performance and thus other people’s pleasure. To walk out provokes tuts of disapproval and scowls of indignation. And yet while it’s

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The economic purge of the young white male

I can remember when I first realized that something strange was happening to white men in Hollywood. It was around 2014, and my younger colleagues in LA – often British writers, directors and actors who had moved to California to “make it” – began reporting, anecdotally, that their work was disappearing. By that I don’t

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Robert De Niro has a serious case of Trump envy

The past few weeks has seen the pleasing spectacle of beautiful female film stars (Sydney Sweeney, Keira Knightley – even the previous Trump Derangement Syndrome sufferer Jennifer Lawrence, who once said that an orange victory would be “the end of the world”) refusing to toe the accepted Hollywood line on politics, be it by not kowtowing

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Against flakes

A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in society. I call it “Lastminute.non.” Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not

The perils of public grief

There is no greater tabula rasa in the public imagination than grief.  Prince Philip’s four children – no strangers to the glare of public interest – now find themselves the target not of global ire, but rather unusually, of collective sympathy. For public figures, the warm light of communal compassion imbues recognition and significance on the lives

All hail the free-thinking revolution

In January, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman interviewed the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson. The channel broadcast a short version of the interview on the evening news bulletin, where it would have been seen by the few hundred thousand people who watch the programme nightly. But to its credit, Channel 4 also published online the full half-hour