‘You are safe here,’ says a sign at the railway station in Przemysl, less than ten miles from the Ukrainian border. The city was one of the first in Poland to open its doors to those fleeing the war – but I’m travelling through it in the opposite direction. Last year, I was one of
For reasons too complex to go into, while completing a doctorate in the German College in Rome in the 1990s, I shared breakfast with the then Cardinal Ratzinger every Thursday morning for nearly three years. Those breakfasts were often initially awkward because, although the Cardinal was always gracious, he had no ‘small chat’ at all
Here’s a jolly thought to start the year: humanity is on its way to extinction due to a drastic decline in sperm counts. Men’s reproductive health is in such a parlous state that it won’t be long until nobody can conceive a child unassisted. That, anyway, is the argument that’s become a perennial: every year
After Liz Truss’s spectacular fall from power, it was hard to find Tories who were happy to admit to having supported her. ‘Trussonomics’ became a punchline. Most of her plans were scrapped, including, this week, her childcare proposals. But among the wreckage of the Truss experiment, there is one survivor who is willing to defend
We’ve long known that computers can beat us at chess, so does it matter if they have started to beat us at more verbal and collaborative games such as Diplomacy? It certainly does, and suggests a future in which artificial intelligence may begin to play a growing role in the whole spectrum of international affairs,
If there is one minor pitfall of being a travel writer, it is this. Whenever you tell a bunch of people what you do, invariably someone will ask: ‘Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?’ I struggled to answer until I got on a special new boat called the Greg Mortimer, operated by a Australian
Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. He was the US Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and was one of the most powerful and influential people of the 20th and 21st century. He wrote the following piece for The Spectator for our Christmas issue last year. The first world
After Rishi Sunak lost the summer Tory leadership contest, he started on Plan B: to be selected for the Kirby Sigston cricket team in his Yorkshire constituency. He had hoped to play for the club when he was first elected as an MP seven years ago, but politics got in the way. Suddenly with more
I had my first in-person audition since the Covid era began last week. What a thrill finally to be in a room with the casting director, director and producer rather than the lockdown-triggered misery of self-taping. Actors generally fall into two categories: those who rather like watching themselves and those who would rather be boiled
Before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, there was a narrow but clearly defined space for Russia’s opposition media. The fearlessly anti-Kremlin Novaya Gazeta – whose editor-in-chief Dmitry Muratov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year – was not only tolerated but funded by a regime-friendly oligarch at the behest of the deputy head of
It was 9.45 p.m. and yellow light beamed from the church windows into the rainy night. As I opened the door the last bars of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ reverberated from the chancel. This was a rehearsal by the London Docklands Singers. ‘Everyone knows the “Hallelujah Chorus”,’ said the conductor, Andrew Campling. ‘It’s in the DNA
TOM HOLLAND: Here’s something I always wonder when I read one of your books. You’ve written novels set in the present, you’ve even written a novel set in the future, but overwhelmingly your fiction is set in past periods, spanning ancient Rome up to the second world war. What is it about the past that
A few weeks ago I was 40,000ft in the air with Nellie, my wife, and our newborn daughter on our first cross-country flight when the latter decided to test the technological limits of her Pampers Pure Protection Size 2. I was bent over in the aisle, blocking traffic, sweating, wrangling her out of her soiled
The Christmas present that comes with this article is an original artwork by Britain’s greatest living illustrator, Quentin Blake. By happy chance, this Friday – 16 December – is also his 90th birthday. Hip hip hooray! It is not the first illustration he has drawn for this magazine, which is why it’s very apt that
Christmas has an annoying tendency to kick off far too early these days, but I can never give into it until after my son’s birthday on 23 November. This year he turned 18, which feels like a milestone for both of us. He can now legally be served in a pub and go to prison,
Steam, which is largely insubstantial, rises. The same goes for soap suds, methane bubbles and numerous politicians. We naively consider 21st-century Britain a meritocracy, yet serial failures still float to the top of our public life. It has been a good year for these latter-day Widmerpools. Two changes of prime minister provided rich openings. One
Lazarivka Snow has covered the fields and forests of much of Ukraine. When the sun reigns in the sky, its rays gild the scene. All my previous winters, all previous Christmas celebrations, were peaceful, and the snow, if it came, emphasised this calmness. Snow and cold preserve the life of the grass until spring, until
F. Scott Fitzgerald declared in an excellent late story that ‘the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things’. It is certainly what I am striving to do. I have far too much stuff so I’ve decided a little culling is needed. Some weeding out imperative, deaccessions inevitable. I’ve startedwith
When Nasa launched the James Webb Space telescope on Christmas Day last year its goal was to shed light on the wonders of the universe. It’s delivering on that promise: since the summer we’ve had a steady stream of stunning images of dying stars, distant planets and colliding galaxies. Researchers expected the telescope’s data would
Twiddling my thumbs at the Rotterdam depot. Waiting on 72 pallets of Chinese tumble dryer. Five games of online chess, four YouTubes of sweary parrots, three Gordon Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares, two Idiots In Cars and a partridge in a pear tree later, it’s 12 noon. Another Pot Noodle for lunch. Spicy seafood, the label alleges.