Competition

Wednesday

The Spectator

The Spectator is looking for a political cartoonist

Here’s your chance to have your illustrations featured in The Spectator.  We’re looking for fresh, funny, and original work. Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just starting out, this is your opportunity to submit your work, as we invite new cartoonists to join our ranks. Picture the cover of The Spectator. What would you put on it? Picture an article you have read recently in the magazine. How would you illustrate it?  If you are a terrific caricaturist, fantastic storyteller and wit who doesn’t take anything too seriously, please throw your hat in the ring. Submit your best cartoons and join the legendary illustrators who have graced the pages of

Tuesday

Jonathan Boff

When Britannia ceased to rule the waves

When the Royal Navy celebrated Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, 173 ships and 50,000 sailors filled the Solent. The Spectator (3 July 1897) described the ‘endless succession of battleships, cruisers, destroyers, gunboats and torpedo boats’ as offering ‘the most magnificent naval spectacle ever beheld’. More importantly, the fleet at Spithead ‘would have been able to beat any navy or combination of navies that might be brought against it’. It constituted, the magazine proclaimed, a purely defensive weapon, designed only to safeguard the shores of the British Isles, protect the colonies and police the seas ‘for the benefit, not of Englishmen alone, but of the whole world’. Not everyone was

Tuesday

Emily Rhodes

Boxing clever: Headshot, by Rita Bullwinkel, reviewed

Rita Bullwinkel’s knockout debut novel adopts the structure of the boxing tournament it vividly describes. Eight teenage girls are competing in the ‘Daughters of America Cup’ at Bob’s Boxing Palace, Reno. We encounter them in the ring as they progress through four opening rounds and two semis to the final. The author details the exhilarating, pummelling progress of the fights – ‘the hit is quick, like a jump rope whipping forward’ – and the physicality of the girls’ bodies, ‘so close to each other that, from far away they look like two parts of the same animal’. She also nimbly delves beneath the protective headgear into the girls’ interior worlds