Columnists

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 10 June 2006

Isn’t it time now that the Conservatives fulfilled their new leader’s pledge. Although we send 250 police in search of possible terrorists in east London, our government takes a completely opposite attitude to the subject whenever it’s Irish. After the IRA was involved in the murder of Robert McCartney and the robbery of the Northern

Any other business

An insatiable appetite for art

Never in living memory has there been so much interest in buying art as there is now. Across all categories, from Old Masters to Impressionists to photographs, but mostly in 20th-century paintings, the international appetite for buying art has been steadily building in an art-market bull run that has already lasted 11 years. In the

Humbugs, scallywags, hustlers and fools

If a bull market can turn a moron into a genius, the art market deserves government funding. It has done for the elite what the housing boom has done for the lumpen. They all think they deserve a Nobel Prize. What a delight for the art-mongers! The buyers’ pockets are full, their heads are empty,

Hot stocks and naughty boys

What do the following have in common: metatarsally challenged footballing wonderkid Wayne Rooney, two-time-Ashes-winning spin bowler Phil Edmonds, one-time Greek oil explorer Frank Timis, and ‘Brian Cohen’, the eponymous hero of The Life of Brian? Is it that they are not messiahs, but in fact rather naughty boys; or that they are all regarded favourably

The misleading dimensions of persons and lives

I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I