At this time of year, switching on the radio to hear the twinkling harp at the start of ‘The First Nowell’ from Hely-Hutchinson’s Carol Symphony has a profound Proustian effect on an entire generation. It takes us back to our childhood living rooms in 1984, sitting cross-legged in front of a boxy TV with a
Mark Darcy’s Christmas jumper has come a long way since it repelled the heroine of Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001) at her mother’s annual New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet. The green turtleneck, festooned with a red-nosed reindeer, sold for £5,670 at auction in November. Colin Firth has protested that he’s been ‘unfairly blamed for subsequent
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
38 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: pondering AI, Matthew Parris wonders if he is alone in thinking (1:10); Joanna Bell meets the leader of the Independent Ireland party, Michael Collins, ahead of the Irish general election later this month (8:41); Professor Peter Frankopan argues that the world is facing a new race to rule the seas
Babycham, the drink you perhaps last sipped while tapping the ash from a black Sobranie as Sade played on the jukebox, is coming back. Launched in 1953 by Francis Showering of the Somerset cider family, it was aimed at giving women something to drink in the pub other than a port and lemon. Demand for
‘The wines were too various: it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.’ This is the meet-cute at the beginning of Brideshead Revisited. Lord Sebastian Flyte chunders through the window into the ground floor quarters of Charles Ryder. Seduced by these smart shenanigans, Charles proceeds to dump his
It’s the season to do the rounds of senior schools and my 10-year-old son and I have been jostling through the crowds to glimpse science labs and drama workshops for the past month. Open days for the top state schools have been heaving. At a state boarding school rated ‘outstanding’ by Ofsted (boarding fees aren’t
It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons
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This week: who’s on top in the Conservative leadership race? That’s the question Katy Balls asks in the magazine this week as she looks ahead to the Conservative Party conference. Each Tory hopeful will be pitching for the support of MPs and the party faithful ahead of the next round of voting. Who’s got the
There’s a grumble, often repeated among country folk, that ‘hunting people got hunting banned’. What they mean (I think) is that a combination of complacency, arrogance and the failure to get the public onside is what did for hunting. It’s not really fair: arguably, without the disaster of the Iraq war, Tony Blair may not
The look on the face of A&E staff was one of horror and disbelief. ‘He’s playing contact rugby – at eight?’ I nodded, my son Gus’s left arm hanging uselessly by his side, his face white and pinched with pain. Later, after we emerged from the X-ray and plaster rooms with a diagnosis of a
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This week: Gus Carter reports from Rotherham (01:10), Paul Wood asks whether anything can stop full-scale conflict in the Middle East (05:55), Jonathan Aitken takes us inside Nixon’s resignation melodrama (16:55), Laura Gascoigne reviews Revealing Nature: The Art of Cedric Morris and Lett-Haines (26:08), and Flora Watkins reads her notes on ragwort (31:24). Produced and
White, lacy cow parsley frothing along the roadside is a familiar sight during the British summer. But 2024 is the first year I can remember when it’s been superseded by the retina-scorching yellow of ragwort. Whether you consider common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea) the ‘yellow peril’ or a precious wildflower crucial to biodiversity depends on whether
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: after President Biden’s debate disaster, Freddy Gray profiles the one woman who could persuade him to step down, his wife Jill (1:05); Angus Colwell reports from Israel, where escalation of war seems a very real possibility (9:02); Matthew Parris attempts to reappraise the past 14 years of Conservative government (14:16);
I’m writing this in my car, laptop on knees and a delicious can of Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla gin and tonic in the drinks holder, while my sons are at cricket practice. It’s an inclement evening, but were it a sunny summer’s day, the Yummy Mummies would be sprawled around the boundary in their Veja
As any child of the 1980s could tell you, whether your house had a Sky dish had nothing to do with income. The launch of BSkyB in 1989 – when Rishi Sunak was eight and I was 10 – was greeted with horror by our middle-class professional parents, just as with their parent’s generation when
Given that I know the author, would I feel inhibited about reviewing her new book critically, I asked myself. But other than meeting her once at a party for two minutes, I realised that I know Clover Stroud only through her raw, ravishing memoirs and – like the rest of her 37,000 Instagram followers –
Churchill had his black dog tailing him around. I used to have black horses galloping through my head. They careered around out of control, rendering me so anxious that I couldn’t sleep the night before I was due to heave myself into the saddle as a civilian support rider for the Household Cavalry. So the
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This week: The Xi files: China’s global spy network. A Tory parliamentary aide and an academic were arrested this week for allegedly passing ‘prejudicial information’ to China. In his cover piece Nigel Inkster, MI6’s former director of operations and intelligence, explains the nature of this global spy network: hacking, bribery, manhunts for targets and more.
The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book groups where someone would insist, ‘We really must do Dostoevsky this year.’ Members of the JCBC, in a co-founder’s words, just wanted to get together to ‘drink champagne and shriek about Jilly’. ‘Book clubs are