Matthew Parris

War in South Africa — the second Boer war — was already brewing by Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Two years later it began. By the end of the century Britain was bogged down and struggling. On the Queen’s death in 1901 the unholy mess continued. In 1902 we were finally able to declare

Observing the fealties of football supporters, I’ve been struck by a contradiction that troubles any non-sporting mind. To a fan, which team you support is often a matter of chance. But once you’ve attached yourself to a team, the loyalty can be ferocious, and run deep. It can become part of who you are. So

I’ve much respect for the Matlock ­Mercury: our part of the Derbyshire dales would be the poorer without this lively and conscientious local paper. And were it not for the Mercury’s useful report I’d never even have learned about the county council’s plan. But I do take issue with the headline. ‘Big switch-off to hit

A slow reader but someone who has to plough through stuff for work, I skim and flick uneasily, and by middle age had almost completely lost my teenage habit of unhurried reading for pleasure. But in the last decade I’ve started again in a gentle way to read fiction and biography for amusement alone. It

I’m not the first columnist and will not be the last to shrink from finding out too much. For this there are subtler reasons than laziness: a half-acknowledged fear that one’s argument will lose shape; that complexity may overwhelm understanding; that counterfactuals and shades of grey spoil a simple picture, and resolution sink beneath a

My reaction last week, I suppose, will not be dissimilar from those of the majority of my readers. I growled. From my radio came a report about problems that British researchers were encountering with supplies of mice for medical experiments. Apparently anti-vivisectionists have been targeting the transport companies that bring supplies of mice from the

Is The Spectator like the owner of ‘a wall which has been festooned, overnight, with defamatory graffiti’? At its most thrilling this magazine does sometimes feel like that; but, in truth, the editorial hand here (though it may seem marvellously light to us contributors) is a quiet background presence protecting us and our potential victims

This goes to print on Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. So allow me to pitch in to February’s religion-versus-secularism debate from a new direction. As an unbeliever I wish to complain on behalf of serious religious belief. Faith is being defended by the wrong people, in the wrong way. ‘Faith’ means faith. Doubt

I think her first name was Denise. It was hard to discern on her small easyjet name badge; but the surname was certainly Williams. So let’s call her Denise Williams. The name matters less than the circumstance. It was Luton Airport departures corridor (gates 1 to 8 to the best of my recollection); the time

James Moriarty, Hannibal Lecter, Silas Lynch, Simon Legree, Iago, Iscariot, Schettino… pity Francesco Schettino:  all but doomed by his name alone. What a great name for an alleged villain. The skipper of the Costa Concordia, the cruise liner now wrecked off a Tuscan island whose name sounds like a typographical tweaking of ‘gigolo’, presents an

Infrastructure. Still reading this? Well done, because the word alone will have lost half my readers at first sight. Infrastructure is a big idea dogged by a dreadful modern name. If Thomas Telford, John Rennie, Joseph Paxton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Joseph Bazalgette had been informed as little boys that they were to dedicate their

Sometimes it is by catching ourselves unawares that we see ourselves best. That unprepossessing fellow with a dull, crumpled, peasant face and a faintly disobliged expression that you caught a glimpse of in the shop window while Christmas shopping on Oxford Street — oh crikey, that was you. Our looks, however, are not our fault.

My friend Stephen (let us call him Stephen) is an unsentimental sort of man. In his thirties, he has a sharper mind than his job as a middle-ranking civil servant really demands, but he has more or less settled down. Stylish (and one for the girls) in his twenties, he keeps his neat good looks

Another Remembrance Day app­roaches as I write. Another autumnal Sunday; another Last Post; those poppies again; in Derbyshire the church parades; another nationwide two-minute silence. The occasion always sets me thinking about what people call ‘perspective’ in history. Sir Percy Cradock, leaving Peking as ambassador nearly 30 years ago, said something about history’s rear-view mirror

Do you remember that classic 1980s American TV series about a group of elderly American women, The Golden Girls? You could call the sitcom the geriatric equivalent of Friends: equally sharp, and every bit as addictive. One of the central characters (she was called Rose) was forever lapsing into interminable accounts of uninteresting events. Her