The more elderly among The Spectator’s readership, who still secretly mourn the loss of Nyasaland and the Aden protectorate, may be pleased to hear that a small step was taken last month towards reversing the Empire’s inexorable decline. More surprising still, the idea behind this expansion comes from an American economist and the flag raised
As someone who has a panic attack when the Sky box fails to work, I am fascinated by people who stay calm in a major crisis. Hence I love listening to cockpit voice recordings on YouTube. Among the best are Apollo XIII and ‘US Airways Flight 1549’ — the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’. With both
There is no shortage of competitors for the strangest site on the internet. ‘The Britney Spears Guide to Semiconductor Physics’, for instance. Or gooseduds.com — an essential website (essential, that is, if you have ornamental garden geese and feel the urge to dress them in seasonal clothes). Or hatsofmeat.com, a website that shows exactly what
I could paint a Mona Lisa, I could be another Caesar; Compose an oratorio that is sublime. The door’s not shut on my genius – but I just don’t have the time. Like Flanders & Swann’s sloth, many people are secretly convinced that they could write a masterpiece. Almost everyone also believes that they could
On tax policy I find I am now a Liberal Democrat. This is a bit of an identity crisis for me. A bit like coming out. Or waking up as a giant insect. But I just really like Gloria Gaynor — sorry, I meant not taxing earnings under £10,000 a year. And the musical theatre
Only two things matter when choosing a car. What is it like to drive fast? And what is it like to drive very, very slowly? Forget about cornering and acceleration. Very little of our time in cars is spent negotiating hairpin bends or revving chavvishly at a junction. Most motoring falls into two distinct categories.
I have noticed Britons in France or Italy cringe with embarrassment, and mutter apologies to waiters when ordering a cappuccino after dinner — or at any time after noon. ‘Look, you needn’t apologise,’ I say. ‘The reason foreigners drink their coffee black isn’t because they’re sophisticated: it’s because their milk tastes like crap.’ It has
I had a Land Rover Discovery once. It was expensive to run, largely on account of the rear visibility. The blind spot was so large that, when reversing, you had to worry not only about lurking cats, shrubs and bollards but also bungalows. I felt proud whenever I went for six months without needing to
1) Imagine you have the choice of living in two worlds. In World A you have a five-bedroom house and everyone you know has a six-bedroom house. In World B you have a four-bedroom house and all your friends have three-bedroom houses. Which world would you prefer? 2) You can live in World C, where
Why am I typing this article rather than dictating it via some wonderful voice recognition software? It’s a question worth asking. Twenty years ago, all Spectator writers would have written every article by hand (only two or three still do). In my office in the 1980s, it was frowned on to type your own letters,
A few years ago in Malaysia I found myself reading the national paper, the New Straits Times. There was a headline on the front page that caught my eye. It read something like ‘New road to the airport will make it easier to get to the airport’. I’m sure those weren’t the exact words, but
If you are a Spectator subscriber, the plastic wrapper in which your magazine arrived this morning is probably already in the bin in the kitchen. By now it has been joined by two sodden teabags, four strips of bacon rind and a couple of eggshells. Try to steel yourself now, pull on a pair of
I came face to face with the real banking problem a month ago when speaking in Oxford to an audience of undergraduates. ‘Well, I suppose one good thing about the last three years is that you won’t now all be applying to work in banks,’ I joked. It seems I was wrong. At these words,
True or not, there is a persistent story about a former Duke of Devonshire who, seeing some silver napkin rings in Asprey’s, asked his companion what they were for. ‘Your grace, in some households they roll napkins inside these rings so that they can be used for a subsequent meal, rather than being laundered every
A friend of mine once spent a week on a vast luxury yacht cruising the Mediterranean. It was all jolly pleasant, he remembered, except for a strange thing: throughout the entire trip, the only time the shipboard party had experienced what you might call ‘fun’ was when somebody discovered in a locker some kind of
How can something as complicated as a human eye possibly arise through a process of natural selection — through trial and error? Most people will have asked themselves this question at some point in their lives, but without bothering to find out the answer. A pity, since the stage-by-stage explanation of how the eye might
I recently watched another one of those delightfully obscure BBC4 archive documentaries. This one was called Bristol on Film. I like archival film footage for what it reveals unintentionally: the incidental details which have nothing to do with the film-maker’s original intent, but which 60 years later reveal how profoundly the world has changed. Like
Two interesting news items coincided the other week Two interesting news items coincided the other week. The growing debate about the relatively light tax burden shouldered by the massively rich and the partial retirement of Steve Jobs. One dog failed to bark in the night. No one, as far as I can see, dared name
It was the biggest technological story of the month and I missed it. Instead it was my much cooler friend, Jonathan Akwue, who first mentioned Blackberry Messenger and its possible connection with the riots (at urbanmashup.wordpress.com). He spent the next two weeks fielding inquiries from the media. Blackberry Messenger (or BBM, as its users call
A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary metrics applied to train travel — and how a trivial reduction in journey time, a measure with little relationship to human pleasure or productivity, has been used to justify the insane cost of a new rail link to Birmingham A fortnight ago, I wrote about the arbitrary