Spectator Life

When Herbert von Karajan was at his celestial height in the 1960s, juggling conducting duties at the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera and the Salzburg Festival, his musicians liked to tell a joke. ‘Karajan gets in a taxi, and the driver asks, “Where to?” Karajan says, “It doesn’t matter, they want me everywhere.”’ Not

Shortly before midnight on the evening of Friday 24 January 1975, at Cologne Opera House on the banks of the Rhine, a wiry 29-year-old from Pennsylvania walked onto the stage in front of a crowd of 1,400 people and began to play the piano, alone. The 50th anniversary of what followed is being celebrated with

What is prison for? I’ve wondered that a lot, these past five years. In February 2020, just a few days after the UK left the European Union, and as scientists worked to agree an official name for the ‘new coronavirus’, I was sentenced to 45 months in prison for a fraud I’d committed in 2014.

If you fancy watching a live performance of Fleetwood Mac’s hits, there’s plenty of choice in tribute band land: Fleetwood Shack or Fleetwood Bac, McFleetwood or Rumours of Fleetwood Mac – or perhaps Tusk, Tell Me Lies, Fleetwood Macrame or Gypsy Dreams. Or you could wait to see if the real Fleetwood Mac tour again, minus

When Rachel Reeves was the shadow chancellor, she would round up the spare pastries at the end of meetings and save them for later. No wastage! Her intentions were surely good, but she would have known that there were witnesses, and she knows how political gossip works. Now, as chancellor of the exchequer, she has

Watching the Cure’s live-streamed performance of their first album in 16 years, it was hard not to notice the toll time has taken on Robert Smith. At 65, his black spiky hair has long turned into a bedhead of fag-ash grey – a reminder to those of us who have grown up with him that

I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of

As 2025 gets under way, I’m going to guess that one of your hopes for the coming year is ‘to be happy’. I’m also going to take a punt that you’re likely to spend a considerable amount of time, effort and money doing things you hope will make you feel that way. But considering that

I awoke in the early afternoon of 31 December 1995 face down on the carpeted floor of a mansion house flat in Notting Hill with the worst hangover I have ever had.  It is customary when writing about hangovers to quote the best description of the condition – by Kingsley Amis: ‘A dusty thudding in his head made

Any moment now it will begin – and then it won’t stop for a month. Because as we enter the new year, the twin horsemen of the joyless apocalypse – the anti-booze and anti-meat lobby – pounce upon the January blues like a starved dog on the Christmas leftovers. And they are merciless. Give up

There comes a time right after the new year when the retail sector decides it’s done with fairy lights and sparkles. Out goes the party food, the bao buns with Santa hats, the mixed platters of prosciutto and cheese, the gift sets of flavoured olive oil and the festive cheeseboards. On the discount rails there

Rod Liddle The angels in Jim Crace’s Eden are tetchy and petty authoritarians, apart from one who can’t fly properly. This dissertation on freedom and mortality is rather wonderful – published two years ago but I caught up with it only this year. The best non-fiction book of the year is David Goodhart’s The Care

Come on in, take a seat, drink deep by the roaring hearth and don’t worry about the time – there’s bound to be a lock-in. Such is the Christmas Eve pub scenario of our fantasies. It’s been a long trek back to our home town, most likely thanks to a ‘cow on the line’ or

Those who still make a habit of the Sunday roast are faced with a challenge come Christmas: how to make sure the big meal doesn’t disappoint. What if the turkey is a let-down given everyone so loves the topside of beef? It would take a real Grinch to sniff at the festive spread – we

Perhaps because more and more BBC radio programmes are being broadcast from Salford, the whole of Britain is getting used to hearing multiple uses of the expression ‘I was sat’ or ‘I was stood’. Often, those words come at the very beginning of programmes, spoken by the presenter to set the scene. ‘I’m sat in

For a spell in the late 1970s there were two pop groups which dominated the UK singles charts – both, coincidentally, vocal quartets from continental northern Europe. But while one, Abba, have since become a billion-pound industry with an apparently permanent hologram-shaped presence on the London concert scene, their then rivals for pop supremacy, Boney

In the pantheon of memorable pop songs, Chappell Roan’s ‘HOT TO GO!’ is right up there. A breezy, unpretentious electropop effort, it has quite a forgettable verse, but that soon gives way to a shouty, cheerleader-style chorus in which Ms Roan repeatedly informs us that she is, indeed, ‘hot to go’. Somehow I recently heard

Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty found it crushing to realise that he was never going to be given the part of Hamlet – ‘I shall never play the Dane!’ – for many of us, an equal disappointment is realising, sooner or later, that we’ll probably die uninvited onto Desert Island Discs. This programme has run

Middle-aged men might be feeling persecuted at the moment. But we bring so much of the opprobrium upon ourselves. The MasterChef host Gregg Wallace has, it should be remembered, not been charged with any crime. But the allegations of his inappropriate, predatory and downright cringe-worthy behaviour towards women have inspired the kind of reaction among

A famously elitist members’ club, a 900-year-old meat market, and a traditional old barbershop may not feel like they have much in common. In fact, they didn’t – not until the last week or two, when they all simultaneously closed in their disparate parts of London. The first closure, that of the Groucho Club, has

In 1986 the late Martin Amis published a book of essays called The Moronic Inferno – a title he had borrowed from the writers Saul Bellow and Wyndham Lewis. The essays focused on Amis’s dim view of culture in the USA. These aspects of American life have long since crossed the pond, and we are

To call Gregg Wallace a ‘national treasure’, as some did after his fall from grace last week, was inaccurate. Just because he is (or was) very popular on television does not qualify him. To attain national treasure status, a person needs to be older, as well as much nicer. The expression is vastly overused, lavished

It’s an interesting and unusual word, agentic. For a start, some language enthusiasts dislike it as a mulish crossbreed of Latin and Greek. Also, its etymology is obscure. It appears to derive from 20th-century psychology: one of its first usages can be found in a study of the infamous 1960s Milgram experiments at Yale University,