‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of coffee in his airy open-plan kitchen. ‘This is a bone I have been waiting to pick for, oh, 35 years. That bloody maze!’ Livingstone chuckles. ‘That was Steve’s. He’s the sadist.’ That maze, in a
In the midst of all the outrage about modern-day slavery, usually vulnerable men forced into manual labour, there is actually a far worse form of abuse going on in the UK. It happens in every city, town and even village. It’s endemic to every culture and region of the world, and yet these days we
A vast cohort of bright young things have secured their university places with A-level success this week. But things are not so rosy at the universities they will set off to join: after 25 years of rapid expansion, the sector is drifting away from both the core principles of education and the world of work.
Washington DC The National Enquirer presented Trump watchers with a mystery last week. Why did it print an attack on Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort? A headline screamed: ‘Trump advisor sex scandal — Paul Manafort’s sick affair.’ A 68-year-old man’s alleged dalliance with a ‘hottie half his age’ might seem a trivial subject
Setting off to spend a year teaching English in Zhejiang province in south-eastern China, I expected plenty of surprises. But what struck me most was something they tend not to tell you about in the guidebooks: the racism. It started when I went around the classroom, asking pupils which city they were from. When I
The subtitle of Al Gore’s new film is ‘Truth to Power’, which is supposed to give the impression of brave old Al fighting for right against the mighty fossil fuel establishment. But it is somewhat ironic, given his response when the power being challenged is Gore himself. The former vice president was in London last
As his obituaries pointed out, my brother David made a name for himself with his unrideable bicycle; his ‘perpetual motion’ machine — a bicycle wheel still rotating in a frame on our mantelpiece (it attracted 1.1 million hits on a German website); and his theory that the arsenic found in Napoleon’s hair and fingernails was
Wednesday marked the 72nd anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompted Emperor Hirohito to announce Japan’s surrender in a radio address, though fanatical war hawks tried to stop him. After 1945, Japan developed a pacifist movement and a so-called peace constitution. No country has deployed these
Dwight Eisenhower was right to warn Americans in 1961 of the ‘military industrial complex’, but perhaps it is now the only thing that stands between the US and chaos. The new White House chief of staff, General John F. Kelly, is the third general Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet. Kelly is already getting
As the floodwaters subsided, the Ark drifted across northern Iraq. Finally, with a crunching jolt, it hit dry land. Its timbers had scraped the peak of a mountain range called Sinjar. Water began to pour in. Fortunately, a black serpent, its coils as thick as an arm, moved to plug the breach. The Ark did
How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the
Your typical Trollope-loving, Brahms-bothering Spectator reader probably won’t be aware that the most recent winner of Big Brother was a girl called Isabelle Warburton, but her victory was a joy to behold — and a lesson to be learned. The unemployed 21-year-old had a tan so orange it made Oompa-Loompas look pale and interesting, and
Silicon Valley looks like a cross between Milton Keynes and the set of the Stepford Wives. Row after row of ordinary houses and picket fences, clustered in villages notable only for the mega-companies they serve: Menlo Park (Facebook), Cupertino (Apple) or Mountain View (Google). There’s the odd charm, but it’s generally clean, sterile, young, overpriced.
Last weekend, I got into a conversation with the son of an old friend. He’s a nice middle-class boy, mid-twenties, who plays in a band and has lots of tats and piercings. We got into a conversation about summer festivals. I was telling him about a wonderful one I’d been to — the Curious Arts
Washington D.C. Even a reality show needs good plot twists, and Donald Trump has delivered them like the master he is. First the misdirection: a week of publicly humiliating his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, to the point where Sessions would surely quit or be fired. Then the sudden swerve — it was the press shop, not
England won the cricket World Cup for the fourth time. Huzzah! England reached the semi-finals of the European football championship. Huzzah again! Or you can, as some have preferred, say well, it’s not really England, is it? It’s England women — and that’s not the same thing at all. Ten points for observation, eh? I
Our family holiday snaps used to be slides. We’d gather in the sitting room while Dad clicked through each one. He and my mother are archaeologists, so the pictures were short on people and long on fortifications. These days we tourists take so many photographs that a slide show would take all day. We record
‘Some wine? How about a beer? Shall we settle into a good old pub?’ I make these suggestions to Ukip’s interim leader, Steve Crowther, as we meet in central London, but he opts for a quiet bistro where he orders a cup of tea. He has a dapper suit, a ruddy, forceful face and a
‘We remember it not only for the rain that fell, the mud that weighed down the living and swallowed the dead, but also for the courage and bravery of the men who fought here.’ The Prince of Wales was in good voice on Monday at the centenary commemorations of the battle of Passchendaele — more
When I heard the government’s announcement that petrol and diesel cars are to be banned from 2040, I resorted, as I often do for entertainment, to the British Pathé news archive. I found a 1967 film showing trials of a prototype electric Mini, as well as a similar experiment from Ford. Then came this rather