Since I’m considering giving a small Christmas drinks party, I’ve been reading all the festive entertainment features. There are recipes for canapés (does anyone actually make their own complicated snacks?), floral arrangements, garden illuminations and individual cocktails. These suggestions are exhausting enough to put one right off the whole idea. All the experts interviewed on
Perhaps all political careers must end, inevitably, in failure. But few politicians have had careers as meteoric, as surprising, as consequential or as heroic as that of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. In just five years he has gone from TV comedian to victor of the biggest presidential landslide in his country’s history to inspiring wartime
It is the strangest place, the demilitarised zone (DMZ) that separates South Korea from North Korea. It is simultaneously a historic battlefield, a sombre graveyard, a tourist honeypot full of coach parties from Seoul, and a Cold War frontier, hotly defended on either side. One minute you are looking at a kiddies’ funfair, or a
‘Notre-Dame has been restored to its full level of glory, and even more so,’ said the President-elect Donald J. Trump this week, as he confirmed that he would be honouring Emmanuel Macron with his presence for the big reopening of France’s most famous cathedral on Saturday. ‘It will be a very special day for all!’ Just
Looking back on the Queen’s 1992 ‘annus horribilis’, the events involved – though surprising at the time – seem almost staid now. The wife of her favourite son was photographed canoodling with an American. Her daughter divorced. Her daughter-in-law was the co-creator of a frank book about the sorrows of her marriage to the Queen’s
I remember the moment I first understood that we, the British, had a national character. It was in the mid-1970s and my family and I were watching a clip from an American TV show which was being shown to us by ITV for a giggle. It was a celebration of the love between mothers and
At the end of this month, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to settle a wager with another of the world’s most renowned scientists. We don’t yet know who will win, but it is likely to be the wrong person, in my view. The money will probably come
Strange things are happening again in global politics. In Romania, a former UN sustainability adviser who has made admiring remarks about the fascist 1930s Iron Guard movement has just won the first round of the presidential elections. If you like Andrew Tate, the notorious ‘manosphere’ influencer who also happens to be a Romanian resident, you’ll
In they pour, one after another, cheerily thudding on to the doormat: ‘Thank you for insuring with us again! Now, pay us more than you earn in a year!’ Yes, it’s insurance premium renewal time – and they’re shooting up once more. Insurance premiums have swollen unstoppably, expanding upwards for all the world like a
At this time of year I’d usually be writing dozens of Christmas cards, with a Snowball to hand, heavy on the Advocaat. Many would be to people with whom I have no contact at any other time of year. It can be quietly meditative to write a note with an actual fountain pen to an
I’ve always loved cinema, but hardly ever cinemas. It’s no surprise to me that movie-going audiences are in decline. Ticket sales this year are only $4.8 billion, down from $6 billion in 2023. Apparently 65 per cent of Americans now prefer to watch a movie at home, compared with 35 per cent who say they
When a DHL cargo plane crashed while approaching Vilnius airport on Monday, killing one of the crew, it looked like technical failure, but given that Russia was believed to be behind a series of incendiary devices which ignited on DHL flights and in warehouses this summer, inevitably many feared Moscow’s hand. The suspicion is likely
The SAS are worried. Britain’s most elite military unit have come face to face with the IRA, the Taliban and Isis. But the enemy that really concerns them doesn’t carry a gun or wear a suicide belt. It’s the phalanx of lawyers they think are coming for them, armed with a deadly weapon: the European
Boris Johnson is enjoying himself back at The Spectator. ‘My place of former employment,’ the former editor booms as he sits down, stands up, and starts re-ordering items around the wood-panelled office. ‘I like this book-lined air that you’ve given me – very, very grand.’ ‘I found the pandemic a nightmare because I was genuinely
Now that I’m no longer editor of this magazine, I can admit that I spent the election night of 1997 cheering on Tony Blair. Reader, it gets worse. I didn’t particularly want a Labour government but I badly wanted the devolution they had promised. A parliament in Edinburgh would, I thought, consider why the East End
When the Taoiseach Simon Harris called a snap election for 29 November, Ireland’s electricity board asked political parties not to put election posters on telegraph poles. They might as well have asked them to take the time off on holiday. As I drive through the Irish countryside on my way to County Cork, I notice
On Sunday morning, a communications cable between Sweden and Lithuania was damaged, almost certainly deliberately. Just hours later, the C-Lion cable, the only data link between Finland and central Europe, was severed by what authorities have diplomatically called an ‘external impact’. Most would call it sabotage. In a week where the Biden administration finally gave
What will this government be most remembered for? Ed Miliband’s wind turbines? Assisted dying? Farm bankruptcies? No: rather, I suggest it will be football. There were some 34 million attendances at football matches in England’s top four divisions in the 2022/23 season. I bet that most of those fans have no idea what’s about to
The nomination of husky-voiced, musclebound Robert F. Kennedy Jr – who once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park – to be secretary of health and human services in the Trump administration has horrified ‘experts’, according to the BBC. A left-wing Democrat who admires the late Venezuelan Marxist dictator Hugo Chavez, hates big business,
With just over 60 days left in office, Joe Biden’s White House has significantly escalated the Ukraine war it had tried so hard to contain by authorising the use of US-supplied medium-range ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) and antipersonnel mines against targets inside Russia. Biden’s U-turn breaks a long-standing convention on US presidential transitions that