We’re closing 2024 by republishing our five most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 2: David Butterfield’s cover piece from October on the decline of British universities. Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job
In these times of political upheaval, we have at least one consolation – that we can escape into the countryside and leave petty partisanship behind. That’s a sweet idea, but now rather behind the times. Richard Leafe, Chief Executive of the Lake District, has announced that the country’s largest and most popular national park needs
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This week: Decline and Fall – how our greatest universities are betraying students.Our greatest universities are betraying students, writes David Butterfield, who has just resigned from teaching Classics at Cambridge after 21 years. What went wrong? First, class lists of exam results became private, under alleged grounds of ‘data protection’, which snuffed out much of
Last month, after 21 years studying and teaching Classics at the University of Cambridge, I resigned. I loved my job. And it’s precisely because I loved the job I was paid to do, and because I believe so firmly in preserving the excellence of higher education, in Britain and beyond, that I have left. When
What explains The Spectator’s unprecedented success? No weekly in the world has matched its longevity: 196 years and 10,200 issues. In my history of The Spectator, 10,000 Not Out, I talk about the battles that shaped the magazine. It has long been a voice for classic liberal values and in its best moments, kept doing so even
We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has
In a summer where sport as we know it has been cruelly cancelled, opportunities to celebrate athletic heroism are hard to seek. But today, not one but two titanic achievements occurred independently – and only a few miles from each other. Both have a strong chance of being the country’s most impressive running feats of
At last, with the partial easing of lockdown, we have the consolation of an escape into the countryside. There, in the unquestioning simplicity of it all, we can leave society’s struggles behind. A sweet idea, but now rather behind the times, as shown by BBC Countryfile’s recent stirring into action. In its programme last night,
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This week, the Spectator commemorates its 10,000th edition. On the podcast, Cindy Yu speaks to David Butterfield and Fraser Nelson about the magazine’s two centuries of history, finding out about how the publication started, discussing whether it is still the same now as it was originally intended, and hearing about what David calls its ‘industrial
The Spectator now has now reached a milestone unmatched in the global press, by becoming the first magazine to publish a 10,000th issue. To do justice to the history of the world’s oldest weekly magazine is a complex, perhaps even foolhardy task. Having spent the last three years piecing together its past, I can confirm
The Spectator has always known when and how to wield the scalpel. A tour through its history reveals how, from the get-go, it mercilessly parodied the world in which it lived. When still six weeks young, The Spectator savaged the morbid obsessions of late-Georgian society. The caricaturist George Cruikshank exposed the press’s fetishisation of a
As print titles battle logistical disruption and falling sales from Covid-19, it’s worth saluting The Spectator’s long-lasting tenacity. It has appeared without fail now for 192 years, week in, week out. Its publication has continued through both world wars, numerous strikes and protests, power cuts, cholera outbreaks and terrorist attacks. Today, even as the country
As normal life rapidly shuts up shop around us, there’s a need to salvage something positive from the chaos. So perhaps there’s a good story yet to be written about that oldest but most unfashionable of virtues, charity. Before you roll your eyes, I am not saying that, in a time of such sudden and
In 1978, an invitation was sent to some 200 members of Oxford’s Dangerous Sports Club, which simply read: ‘Tea, Rockall, Black Tie.’ The good news was that invitees had never visited this part of the UK; the bad was that it is way out west. Forget Land’s End, or the Western Isles, or even far-flung
Sparks are flying across Oxford quads: an alarming proposal is afoot to make the study of Homer and Virgil, the two most influential poets of the ancient world, optional for Classics students. So why has it become national news for one university course to stop treating two ancient authors as compulsory set texts? Most of
This weekend The Spectator reaches a truly historic milestone. For forty years, it has been the oldest current-affairs or literary magazine in the UK, since Blackwood’s Magazine (1817-1980) at last came to an end. But now, in its 2,300th month, it becomes the longest-running news magazine in the world, taking that title from the journal
An easy one: what links Jack Straw’s Castle, The Labouring Boys and The Jolly Taxpayer? No, not the parliamentary expenses scandal of yesteryear, but the weird and whimsical world of British pub names. It was in 1393 that Richard II ordered brewers to announce their beery business by a prominent sign. Colourful names quickly abounded,
Can the past hold the present to ransom? Can we be culpable for our predecessors’ actions? Knotty questions of this kind have long been debated in British universities. But now these abstractions are finding new and controversial expression. Yesterday, the University of Cambridge made headlines by launching an academic investigation into its historical relationship – direct
There are piles of stones and then there are piles of stones. Anyone can place one rock upon another, but it takes a special endeavour to get the Ordnance Survey to take notice. Once a clutch of cartographers formally recognise a cairn, it will stay mapped for centuries, if not millennia. Wander around Britain’s fells,
Parliament, we are told, is in uncharted territory: the government looks unable to get the Prime Minister’s peculiar brand of Brexit through Parliament, and the House of Commons remains unready to realise the decision of the referendum three years ago. The European Question, that bête noire of Conservative collegiality, has once more split the party.
