An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
14 min listen
While Labour are shuffling people round yet again.. ‘There needs to be a change in messaging from the leader’s office, because otherwise it just looks like he’s rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.’ – Isabel Hardman And the DUP are getting ready to welcome in their third leader in less than a month… ‘Donaldson is actually in
When the government announced an extension of lockdown restrictions I was furious. Furious for political reasons. Furious for economic and libertarian reasons, but – if I’m completely honest – mainly furious because I had tickets to see The Shapeshifters to do a DJ set on Saturday 26th June. However, I have to admit that on
Last Tuesday, the great footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, captain of Portugal, removed two bottles of Coca-Cola from a table in front of him, and tens of millions of pounds of sponsorship money went down the plughole. Ronaldo was at a press conference for the Euro 2021 Championship, in which Coca-Cola had invested heavily – and, as
There are few aesthetic and literary pleasures that compare to browsing in a second-hand bookshop. While it is more or less a given what books will be found in a new bookshop, one of the chief joys of going second hand is that it’s entirely unpredictable what you’ll emerge with. Sometimes, the browser will leave
‘Should I pay in actual money, in-person, in the shop itself?’ I asked my husband incredulously the other day. Yes, he replied, sounding rather bored. Prior to the pandemic such an exchange would not have taken place. I would have simply gone to the shop with no thought of government restrictions to my personal liberties,
As Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark prepare themselves to fulfil many a little boys dream and become real life astronauts on rocket-ship New Shepard, here’s a look at space flight in the movies. No doubt part of the fun for Jeff will be tweaking the noses of fellow space rival billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson. Unless
48 min listen
It seems we are in a new President/Prime Minister alliance of big government spending, should we be excited or concerned? (00:44) Also on the podcast: Are the UK tabloids going woke? (15:00)? And in the wake of the pandemic are we ready to have a grown up conversation about death?(31:11) With Spectator Political Editor James
If you’d like some idea of how Scotland’s long-awaited return to an international football tournament is going, consider this: it took less than an hour of play before the image of goalkeeper David Marshall leaping, despairingly, into his own net in a doomed effort to stop the Czech Republic’s Patrik Schick scoring a goal from
‘Like a sea beast fished up from the depths, or a diver too suddenly hoisted, my veins threatened to burst from the fall in pressure. I had great anxiety and no means of relieving it […] And then it was that the Muse of Painting came to my rescue – out of charity and out
There’s a little fact about Frank Skinner that you might have heard before. That before his big television break, the future comic and Three Lions scribe had a rather different vocation: as an English teacher in an FE college. Throughout his time in the spotlight, it’s been one of those things that gets brought up
John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place (2018) and its sequel, released this month, ratchets up the tension, as the hapless Abbott family once again silently contend with homicidal creatures possessing hypersensitive hearing who will strike at the smallest of noises. As the new film hits our screens, you’ll be able to hear a pin drop in cinemas everywhere.
First things first: don’t get your hopes up. England don’t have a bad team. In fact, this year they’re pretty good; not quite the ‘golden generation’ of 2006, but good enough to win the tournament. That very fact ought to sound a note of caution: we’ve been down this weary road before. After the year
BBC One’s new jailhouse drama is surprisingly watchable. ‘Time’ had me itching in my seat. And not in a good way. As a former prison officer, I remember the ‘NATO standard’ woolly pulley worn by Stephen Graham’s character with no affection but at least his seems to fit, which is bad continuity. All chafing aside, Sunday’s
This month sees the debut of GB News, the new free-to-air 24 hour news channel, a competitor to the big fish BBC and Sky. The most recent broadcaster to enter the arena was ITV in 2000, whose underfunded ITV News Channel lasted five short years, shutting up shop on 23rd December 2005, when Alistair Stewart
18 min listen
In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator’s world edition Dominic Green meets DJ Taylor, who writes in the June edition of Spectator World, about Hawkwind, unlikely champions of the British rock underground. Less a band, more a way of life, the fascinating story of Hawkwind veers from the radicalism
34 min listen
Polly Morgan is an artist whose trade is taxidermy. She recently won the First Plinth Award, and in her time has sold to celebrity clients including Kate Moss and Courtney Love. On the podcast, she tells Katy about her unusual childhood growing up on a farm with ostriches, goats and llamas; why she got fired
It’s all eyes on Cornwall today as the G7 summit kicks off, bringing the leaders of the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan to Britain. The various heads of government, having spent months in lockdown, will no doubt be brushing up on their small talk ahead of their various diplomatic meetings, with leaders’ spouses set to
There was a time when having a nervous breakdown on a tennis court was called a hissy fit. Watch John McEnroe shouting at the umpire during the 1981 Wimbledon Men’s Singles first round match against Tom Gullikson for the masterclass. Strutting over to the umpire like an angry bird, his trademark headband doing anything but
24 min listen
Craig Brown is an awarding winning critic, satirist and former restaurant reviewer. His most recent book One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. On the podcast, he talks to Lara and Olivia about the horrible food at Eton, his utter failure to bake a cake, and proposes
So we can hug and kiss each other, but facemasks could be here to stay. There are some people I would rather never hug and kiss again. Nor am I sure I want to socialise in big groups, outside or inside, now that I have become accustomed to cosy nights in. My husband, Harry, calls
To his many readers, Stephen King is the Dreamcatcher; to others, less keen on his prodigious output, Doctor Sleep may be a more fitting appellation. On Friday 4 June, Apple TV+ will debut King’s own 8-part adaptation of his 2006 best-seller Lisey’s Story. Reportedly one of King’s favourite books, the novel harks back to both Misery and The
‘Freezing winter gave way to frosty spring, which in turn merged to chilly summer,’ was how Jessica Mitford recalled her Cotswolds childhood in her memoir, Hons and Rebels. Our inclement climes have rarely been as hard to bear as they have this year, with the unusually cold, grey spring — coupled with the prospect of
How does the word ‘literally’ make you feel? For a lot of language-lovers, the answer will be somewhere between mildly irritated and fist-gnawingly furious. It’s the misuse of the word that most perturbs. It has a habit of lurking where it has no place to be, taking a perfectly acceptable (if conventional) metaphor and turning into nonsense.
Musical fans will be hyped for the film release of Lin Manuel-Miranda’s In The Heights, set to land in cinemas here on 25 June (seven years after its UK stage premiere at the lovely Southwark Playhouse). Of course the Dominican smash is far from the first big musical to make its way to Hollywood. Here
Whilst many Hollywood auteurs began their careers in television (John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, Steven, Sidney Lumet etc), the received wisdom in previous times was that a return to working in the medium signalled a career in serious decline. Lower budgets, shorter rehearsal times, often inferior casts and tight deadline-driven schedules meant that television was very
47 min listen
In this week’s edition of The Green Room, Deputy Editor of The Spectator’s world edition Dominic Green and journalist Arsalan Mohammad celebrate Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday by debating a good old-fashioned mixtape of tunes spanning the old master’s 60-year career (with some background sound effects by Arsalan’s dog). To listen to our selection, head over
I would love to have been there at the original pitch meeting for Friends, ‘So yeah, it’s about a bunch of friends.’ Pitching The Office must have been similarly brusque, ‘It’s about some office workers working in an office.’ And The Simpsons? ‘Oh yeah, that’s the one about a family called… the Simpsons’. Like all
If, like me, you’ve watched every episode of the Great British Bake Off (twice), all the professional series, Junior Bake Off, and the celebrity charity episodes, you might need to look further afield for your next fix of television baking competitions. Fear not, because the GBBO franchise is wide-reaching: the format has been sold in
I’ve bemoaned the ‘no Tories please’ line on dating profiles many a time. Closed-minded and over-used, it’s a banal way for university freshers to virtue signal their wokeness. It’s a phase many go through, and, more’s the pity, do not all grow out of. But as of late, a new, equally lacklustre profile-essential has emerged
