A striking feature of Covid-19 is how medieval our response has had to be. Quarantine was the way people fought plagues in the distant past. We know by now that it will take many months to get a vaccine, whose job is to prevent you getting the disease. But what about a cure once you
Will the recovery be shaped like a V or a U, some other letter or perhaps the Nike swoosh? This is a much-discussed question among economists right now — but it is not the most important question. We’re familiar with the idea of an up-and-down financial crisis where things return to their starting point: we
When Graham Greene impulsively took up film reviewing for The Spectator in 1935, he was not yet the renowned literary figure he was to become, and thus, like so many other writers in those parlous economic times, prosaically in need of cash. As it happened, the confluence of interests between a 30-year-old novelist of modest
Sometimes The Spectator goes to press very shortly after election results have been announced. In those instances, Morten Morland, our cover artist, draws versions to cover for any outcome. These have since been framed and hung at Old Queen Street in the lavatories. For our 10,000th issue, we’re sharing some of them. The last UK general
When Chequers was donated to the nation, the accompanying Act of Parliament was explicit about the intended effect. ‘The better the health of our rulers, the more sanely will they rule,’ it said. Prime ministers need time to think, as well as recuperate, and as Boris Johnson continues his convalescence there, he will be in
It was the week after New Year’s Eve, strings of fairy lights still dangling from the trees and silver stars decorating the windows, when they discovered the dead birds. Dozens, at first. Then more. Four thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight in total. Goldfinches, greenfinches, bullfinches, skylarks, reed buntings, yellowhammers, grey wagtails and red-throated pipits —
When I say goodbye to Sir Salman Rushdie in his offices at New York University in Lower Manhattan in early March, we bump elbows. Not that it’s much more than a gesture, by this stage: we shook hands unthinkingly on first meeting, and we’d just shaken hands again. It’s a novelty, still halfway to being
A conventional hierarchy of print media would put serious journalism at the top. Far beneath that would be tabloid journalism. And then at the very bottom would be advertising. Except, in one respect, I think that order should be reversed. Yesterday’s advertising is much more interesting than yesterday’s serious journalism. I suspect this is because
The Spectator is a child of the 19th century, and damned proud of it. First published in 1828, the link provided by its 10,000 issues to a long-vanished age of Regency waistlines and Romantic poets is one of the great wonders of journalism. Its success was built upon Victorian foundations, yet it is a peculiarity
The Spectator has always known when and how to wield the scalpel. A tour through its history reveals how, from the get-go, it mercilessly parodied the world in which it lived. When still six weeks young, The Spectator savaged the morbid obsessions of late-Georgian society. The caricaturist George Cruikshank exposed the press’s fetishisation of a
Red roses are hardly a priority for people in a virus-wrecked global economy, and one day recently the world’s flower market pretty much collapsed. At the vast Aalsmeer auction in Holland, there were scented mountains of unsold roses, gerberas and tulips. Some last stems still find their way into bouquets across a world that has
The Covid-19 pandemic came along just as Cold War II was getting under way between the United States and the People’s Republic of China — the superpowers of our time — with the European Union and a good many other US allies quietly hoping to be non-aligned. Far from propelling Beijing and Washington towards détente
On Tuesday this week border control cops stopped a van with a shipment of face masks coming through the Channel Tunnel. When they checked the masks they found almost £1 million worth of cocaine tucked in among them. It was a similar story a week earlier. A man called Benjamin Evans was pulled over by the
‘It’s remarkable that bad things don’t happen to us more often,’ notes Bill Bryson in his latest book, a look at the ‘warm wobble of flesh’ that is the human body. He wrote it long before coronavirus upset the world, but parts of it are particularly relevant now. Viruses worth their salt know how to
There’s a friend of mine who likes to torture me occasionally. ‘I really don’t like to tell you this,’ she trills, ‘but I’m looking out on to a field of daffodils. In the hedge just outside the kitchen window there’s a blue tit nesting.’ If she wants to go for a walk, she heads into
In January a friend visited me at my home in Colombo, and I promised him that we would climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (twice, actually), and there would always be another chance to do it, right?
For years, ministers from successive governments have conducted drills for all kinds of pandemic scenarios. But they never imagined a lockdown. It’s a new tool, and its implications — and side effects — have never been properly tested. So no one really thought about the effect it would have on something like domestic abuse. Before
There is an ancient Celtic prayer that is as relevant today as it was all those centuries ago: Be Thou between me and all things grisly, Be Thou before me in all things mean, Be Thou between me and all things gruesome Coming darkly towards me. We live in a grisly time and don’t quite
In these strange times, people naturally turn to the past for orientation: Londoners recall the spirit of the Blitz, while citizens of St Petersburg look back to the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad to remind themselves what they can overcome. But tales of suffering and heroism take us only so far. Humour is just as important.
The American economist and historian Robert Higgs noted long ago that during the 20th century the various wars, and the various declared equivalents of war, such as against drugs and viruses, regularly led to permanent expansions of state power. Power is the ability to coerce physically, war being the pre-eminent coercion. There has to be