Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury)
These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick
In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100
When I was at Magdalen College, Oxford, in the early 1990s, I’d often read ‘Bogsheets’ in the loos by the college bar. They were single pages of anonymous college gossip, cheaply printed off in those pre-internet days. I remember one bogsheet clearly. The headline said, ‘Cheer up!’ And the standfirst said, ‘You’re at the most
Why do the cool die young? I don’t mean famous, cool people like Jimi Hendrix or Jim Morrison. They are members of the 27 Club – the pop stars who died at 27. I mean the schoolboy gods of my youth, the marvellous-looking, self-assured ones, effortlessly going out with the prettiest girls. And now seven
43 min listen
This week: Wild Wes. Ahead of next week’s vote on whether to legalise assisted dying, Health Secretary Wes Streeting is causing trouble for Keir Starmer, writes Katy Balls in the magazine this week. Starmer has been clear that he doesn’t want government ministers to be too outspoken on the issue ahead of a free vote
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… in Dulwich Wood – a charming fragment of the medieval Great North Wood in south London – the self-dubbed ‘Penis Gang’ have been at work. The gang have been daubing huge penises, in red, black and green, on ancient tree trunks
In ‘Church Going’, the poem that gives this charming book its title, Philip Larkin talks about ‘one of the crew that tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were… Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique’. Well, Andrew Ziminski is king of the ruin-bibbers, randy for antique churches. He doesn’t just know what a rood-loft is; he’s
23 min listen
Writer Guy Stagg threw in his job to undertake a pilgrimage to Jerusalem via Rome – choosing a hazardous medieval route across the Alps. It nearly killed him: at one stage, trying to cross a broken bridge in Switzerland, he ended up partially submerged in the water, held up only by his rucksack. On this
Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage
Just like the Anglo-Saxons disastrously paying off the Viking marauders with Danegeld, so the National Trust has attempted to do the same with its desperate virtue-signalling. For the last decade, the Trust has fallen on its knees in deference to every fashionable cause. But, again like the Anglo-Saxons with the Vikings, they can never do
What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly. You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the
Europe is revolting against the tourist invasion. This summer, Venice has started charging a tourist tax to keep visitors at bay. Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza and Formentera have just set up inter-island protests under the slogan, ‘Let’s change course – let’s set limits to tourism’. Barcelona is planning to ban Airbnb. In the Cinque Terre, on
In its latest bout of self-hatred, the National Trust has declared that ‘people from the global majority are widely under-represented in the outdoors, accounting for only 1 per cent of National Park visitors in 2019’. That’s despite 15 per cent of the population in England and Wales being represented by the global majority. It’s one
Street robbery has become an epidemic. Horrible thugs are stealing luxury watches and jewellery in broad daylight. The number of luxury watches stolen almost doubled in England and Wales between 2015 and 2022 – with 25,802 stolen in 2022. The problem is particularly bad in London, where the Metropolitan Police have set up a special unit
36 min listen
This week: how forgiveness was forgotten, why the secular tide might be turning, and looking for romance at the British museum. Up first: The case of Frank Hester points to something deep going on in our culture, writes Douglas Murray in the magazine this week. ‘We have never had to deal with anything like this
Mirabile dictu, as we Latin lovers like to say. In other words, wonderful news! Attractive women have fallen for ancient Rome – and for classicists. Well, that’s what the British Museum thought when it cooked up its advertising campaign for its new show, Legion: Life in the Roman Army, about Roman legionaries. The Museum put
29 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud, Harry Mount reads his diary, in which he recounts a legendary face-off between Barry Humphries and John Lennon (00:45); Lara Prendergast gives her tips for male beauty (06:15); Owen Matthews reports from Kyiv about the Ukrainians’ unbroken spirit (12:40); Catriona Olding writes on the importance of choosing how to
Barry Humphries would have been 90 on 17 February. To commemorate his life, Radio 4 is broadcasting Barry Humphries: Gloriously Uncut that evening. For the programme, I recalled the joy of talking to Barry about the column he wrote for the Oldie. What a delight, too, it was to hear from the great diplomat Sir
32 min listen
On this week’s episode, Lionel Shriver asks if Donald Trump can get a fair trial in America (00:39), Angus Colwell speaks to the Gen-Zers who would fight for Britain (08:25), Matthew Parris makes the case for assisted dying (13:15), Toby Young tells the story of the time he almost died on his gap year (20:43),
Over the heather the wet wind blows, I’ve lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose. The rain comes pattering out of the sky, I’m a Wall soldier, I don’t know why. The mist creeps over the hard grey stone, My girl’s in Tungria; I sleep alone. W.H. Auden was right. Life for
