The Week

Leading article

Covid and the politics of panic

It is 15 months since Sweden’s Coronavirus Commission presented its final report. The 770-page document analysed how the country handled the pandemic and came up with numerous suggestions for how things might have been done better. The initial response, it concluded, was too slow, but the report vindicated the decision to make social distancing measures

Portrait of the week

Diary

My return to dating

The Coronation Street writers have produced 26 scenes to ease me out of the show for long enough for me to nip down to London to do a play for four weeks in the West End. They are long scenes – one is 13 pages – with my screwed-up, long-lost daughter, played by Claire Sweeney.

Ancient and modern

Jeremy Clarke would have felt at home in Pompeii

Classical literature has the reputation of being pretty serious stuff, far removed from the world that Jeremy Clarke inhabited. But he would have felt perfectly at home in Pompeii. Take the conversation decorating the grave monument of the bar-owners Lucius Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas (beat that, Frankie Howerd!): ‘Innkeeper! The bill!’ ‘You’ve had a

Barometer

Who was the original Terf?

Terf wars Who was the original Terf (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)? – The practice of some women’s groups in excluding trans women began almost with the advent of trans women themselves. In 1978, the Lesbian Organisation of Toronto refused membership to a trans woman who identified as a lesbian – saying it would only accept ‘womyn

Letters

Letters: Jeremy Clarke was an example to us all

Goodbye, Jeremy Each week I opened The Spectator at Low Life in part to read that brilliant column and, more recently, to see how Jeremy Clarke was coping with his deteriorating health. Always hoping the column would be there; that he had, despite excruciating pain, penned us another. Like very many of his regular admiring