Alexander Chancellor

It’s 15 years since I first wrote an article about the threat to the nation of the wild boar; but only now, following the death of a driver in a collision with one of these fearsome beasts on the M4 in Wiltshire, is anyone taking any notice (and not very much notice at that). The

For the past two and a half years my brother John has been living next door to me in the Northamptonshire countryside. We have both been most of the time alone in our separate houses, 25 yards apart, and, whenever I’ve been there, I have shared at least one meal a day with him. It

I’ve had various ailments during my first 74 years — the worst being those induced by smoking, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis — but never before have I suffered from back pain. I know many people who have, and I have witnessed the miseries they have suffered — their months spent lying on the

More than ever this year I find friends planning to go abroad for Christmas, some to countries such as India where the sun shines and Christmas is barely celebrated at all. I can see why. The goodwill and good cheer that the festival is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress

This is a tremendous time for ‘ordinary’ people. The elitists, the members of the ‘establishment’, are all on the run. Except, of course, that everybody is ordinary now. Or at least nobody admits to being an insider, a member of the Westminster bubble, of the establishment, or of any such posh outfit. There is no

The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one exception of the Prince of Wales and his wife — it listed the thousand or so people who attended last week’s memorial service for Lady Soames in Westminster Abbey in alphabetical order. This meant, for

I thought that this week I might write about memory loss, but couldn’t remember if I’d written about it last week. Then I remembered that I had written about it, not in The Spectator but in the current issue of the Oldie magazine of which, if I remember correctly, I am the editor. I wrote

On 21 October Ben Bradlee, the famous ex-editor of the Washington Post, died, aged 93. The day before that, on 20 October, Monica Lewinsky, 41, the even more famous ex-girlfriend of Bill Clinton, made her first public speech after ten years spent keeping out of the public eye. They had nothing in common except for

I always dread Hallowe’en. It may have originated in Europe as a Christian celebration for remembering the virtuous dead and wishing them on their way to heaven, but its origins have been long forgotten. Now, more even than Christmas, it is a secular festival sustained by commercial greed. In its modern form, it is an

Perhaps it is because newspapers are going through such hard times that they fill their pages with items that cost them almost nothing to report: in particular, they show ever increasing reliance on futile pieces of research carried out by often obscure academics in any corner of the globe. These people are greedy for publicity

I don’t think I can remember a time when there have been so many scares about. They come at us from every direction, and even sometimes from out of the blue, with names we’ve never heard before. Take Isis, for example, or maybe Isil (there’s not even now a consensus on what to call it).

When some years ago I stopped having to go to an office, mainly because nobody wanted me to go to one, I started to do quite a lot of cooking. I am no natural cook, but I had ambitions. I bought more and more cookery books — Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver,

It’s unusual for somebody promoting his own television programme to tell you not to watch it, but that’s what Evan Davis has been doing. At least, he has asked us not to watch Newsnight during his first week as its chief presenter — the week that is now drawing to its close — because it

Winslow Hall is a large and handsome country house in Buckinghamshire, built in 1700 by Sir Christopher Wren, which Tony Blair nearly bought in 2007 when he was looking for an imposing residence appropriate to his station in life as a retired prime minister.  The people of Winslow, the small town near Buckingham in which

Sometimes I say I’m Scottish, a claim often greeted with understandable derision. I was born in England, in Hertfordshire, went to school and university in England and, apart from some spells abroad as a journalist, have always lived and worked in England. I don’t even have much Scottish blood. My mother was English, from the

Of the nine chickens I used to keep here in Northamptonshire only one survived the summer, and it was the least appealing of them — broody, squawky, aggressive, and a bad layer. The others were all taken, one by one, by foxes. Unfond though I am of the only survivor, a black Sussex hen, she

I have been, on and off, a lifelong smoker; but I gave up in January 2009 on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States. It was out of feelings of solidarity with the poor man, who I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) would have to quit too when he

Back from holiday in Italy, I look out of my kitchen window in Northamptonshire to find the country view blocked by an enormous marquee with red pennants flying from the top. People are bustling about, carrying boxes of cutlery, glasses and china. I suddenly remember that there is to be a wedding reception here tomorrow.

As the holidays draw to a close, Italian newspapers have been reporting with perplexity and distaste on the outlandish behaviour of foreign tourists in Italy, by which they mean young people from northern European countries. One report told of a couple making love in broad daylight on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice,