Mary Wakefield

Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete. The samurai sword incident was back in the spring. The magnolia was in bloom and the citizens of London N1 were about their innocent business, reading for book club and baking (wheat-free). At 3 p.m., a

Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found not guilty of raping a former pupil. Malcolm admitted to getting young (though over-age) girls drunk and to having sex with them in the back of his car. But he and his lawyer, Ben Myers

A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a friend. The friend, who I know and like, had read Douglas Murray’s recent report from Lampedusa about the poor Med-faring migrants, and her question was this: ‘Is everyone at The Spectator a racist?’ Some insults

Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains were open, lights on. Music must have been playing, though I couldn’t hear it through the glass, because she was singing as she danced the dog about, leaning back to balance his considerable weight. Her

Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers of sentiment about history and hymns, Shakespeare and lawn clippings, does it have a hateful heart? I ask because, as I’ve written before, I feel patriotic, and until recently I’ve considered this to be a

These days, on the subject of Islam, non-Muslims have mostly divided into two camps — though there’s a little wandering about between the tents. Camp one says Islam is a religion of peace, and points for proof to the millions of non-violent Muslims around the world. Warlike Muslims are an anomaly, they say, and fight

There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local surgery, what with one thing and another, sitting among the stoic and snivelling, drifting between different doctors. They’re pleasant, if perfunctory, but with each visit I became more sure that something fundamental is awry. The

The murder of over a hundred children by the Taleban in Peshawar left people furious but also frustrated. What can we do to stop the Taleban? Troops are leaving Afghanistan, combat mission over; we’ve no stomach for army casualties and drone strikes too often backfire. Every innocent farmer killed by a drone galvanises local support for the

Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers of sentiment about history and hymns, Shakespeare and lawn clippings, does it have a hateful heart? I ask because, as I’ve written before, I feel patriotic, and until recently I’ve considered this to be a

My niece, Lara, 15, has a mind like a surgical blade. On any subject, from calculus to The X Factor, she finds the heart of the issue and dissects it with alarming ease. Lara makes mincemeat of homework, trailing A grades, which is why it was so odd to find her stumped two weeks ago.

Finally, just in the last few years I’d say, we’ve all begun to accept the role of nature in the great nature/nurture debate. Though we’ve squirmed and baulked, we mostly now do accept that genes inform (to a greater or lesser extent) not just our height and eye-colour, but our personalities: our intelligence, our disposition.

I have a friend who is perhaps best described by that old-fashioned phrase ‘ladies’ man’. He’s not a cad or a bounder — quite the opposite, in fact. He’d never leave a lady in the lurch, or lie to her, he simply enjoys the company of women — quite a lot of women — and

I can’t blame bigwigs in the NHS for the meltdown of our 999 service. It’s fundamentally our own fault that the service we depend on to save our lives is breaking down. We call 999 at the slightest sniffle, which means paramedics and ambulance drivers find it impossible to keep up. They’re run ragged trying

The US has said it has temporarily evacuated its staff from the Libyan capital Tripoli over security concerns. Earlier this year Mary Wakefield discussed in The Spectator how David Cameron wasn’t paying due attention to the troubles in Libya: A few days ago I went to a talk about Syria; one of those events for