Philip Womack is a writer, an ex-private tutor and a parent.
Sometimes, on slow days, I picture Sir Keir Starmer and our Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, doing the can-can while sticking their fingers in their ears and singing ‘la la la I can’t hear you’, to a backdrop of mounting concerns about VAT on school fees. It recently emerged that Tony Blair (for it is he)
In they pour, one after another, cheerily thudding on to the doormat: ‘Thank you for insuring with us again! Now, pay us more than you earn in a year!’ Yes, it’s insurance premium renewal time – and they’re shooting up once more. Insurance premiums have swollen unstoppably, expanding upwards for all the world like a
Those casting their eye over the candidate list for the chancellorship of Oxford University might be forgiven for believing that social mobility has drastically reduced, returning to Trollopean quantities of languid toffs taking part in public life. Competing for the honour are Lord Peter Mandelson and Lord William Hague, both, you might think, the younger
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Philip Womack wonders why students can’t tackle university reading lists (1:12); Ian Thomson contemplates how much Albania has changed since Enver Hoxta’s dictatorship (6:12); Silkie Carlo reveals the worrying rise of supermarket surveillance (13:33); Francis Young provides his notes on Hallowe’en fairies (20:21); and Rory Sutherland worries that Britain may
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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
The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate recently claimed that students are struggling to read long books. Depressingly, he’s right. I could have told him the same thing five years ago, when I was teaching at a well-respected Russell Group university. The problem isn’t that students won’t read Moby-Dick in five days. It’s that even if
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This week: Israel’s revenge and Iran’s humiliation. As the anniversary of the October 7th attacks by Hamas approaches, the crisis in the Middle East has only widened. Israel has sent troops into southern Lebanon and there have been attempted missile strikes from the Houthi rebels in Yemen and from Iran. Is there any way the situation
The other day, clearing out boxes, I stumbled on a sheaf of invitations from childhood. Decorated with trains and fairies, they are very similar to those my children still (just about) receive today, except there’s usually a Thelwell pony instead of Elsa from Frozen. The handwritten addresses, the names of the houses and streets (Bluebell
If King Charles wants a ‘slimmed down’, low-calorie royal family, we can thank Queen Victoria for bequeathing us the plus-size version. Responding in horror to the antics of her naughty uncles, who raked about being unsuitable and having mistresses, she set herself and her nine children to public duty and procreation: go forth and multiply,
Do you know what an anachronism is? They’re very clear in cultural terms: Shakespeare’s clocks in Julius Caesar, for example. But in historical terms, it’s a different matter. When His Majesty King Charles III was crowned, the online scoffers were quick to mobilise themselves. One enthusiastic Jacobin tweeted that the enthroned, orbed and sceptred sovereign
Despite protestations from every quarter, Sir Keir Starmer will press on with his malicious plan to slap VAT on private school fees. I can only assume he’s doing this because he believes an excellent education, stemming from hundreds of years of tradition, is entirely undesirable. Look, there’s no question about it. Our private schools are
Mark Haddon’s latest collection of short stories, Dogs and Monsters, uses myth and history as springboards into mesmerising accounts of isolation, tragedy and, of course, dogs, which are a motif throughout, from the hounds who mistakenly tear apart their owner Actaeon, to one who befriends St Antony at his lowest point. Haddon monitors the borderlines
Ucas, the organisation in charge of university admissions, has announced that it’s bidding bye-bye to a crucial teen rite of passage. It is killing the personal statement. No longer will admissions tutors beetle their brows over flowing paragraphs about when you built an orphanage in Malawi using only a spoon, or how really, really passionate you
Sometimes, it’s not just bombs, viruses and elections that make you worry about the future of humanity. A recent survey, commissioned by the National Literacy Trust, reveals that fewer than one third of eight-to-18-year-olds enjoys writing as a hobby. If you’re thinking that I’m being wistful about fountain pens (‘whatever happened to ink blots?’) you’re
As predictably as the tides, as welcome as a pebble in your shoe, the bogus question of ‘who actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays?’ is in the news again. Jodi Picoult, the writer, thinks that Emilia Bassano (aka Aemilia Lanier), the daughter of a musician, must have had a hand in them, because, she says, Juliet is
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It’s a bumper edition of The Edition this week. After Rishi Sunak called a surprise – and perhaps misguided – snap election just a couple of hours after our press deadline, we had to frantically come up with a new digital cover. To take us through a breathless day in Westminster and the fallout of
You will have heard, I am sure, of the Conservatives’ recent largesse towards working parents, as their ‘free’ childcare policy has been much publicised. Fifteen hours a week for your kid, from nine months old to the grand age of four. You may not, however, have seen the new rules governing au pairs, which came into
As citizens of an orderly state, we allow ourselves to be taxed. We fork out for council tax so that local services function. When it comes to income tax, some may grit their teeth, but we hope it gets funnelled towards the greater good. We accept, though perhaps dislike, ‘sin taxes’ on cigarettes and booze.
Kelly Link’s short-story collections bewilder and delight with their sideways takes on fantasy tropes. People might turn into cats, but they do it while texting emojis (dancing lady, unicorn, happy face). In The Book of Love, Link’s debut novel, she revels in upholding and upturning the genre’s conventions. Mainlining Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and with
Sally Bayley’s The Green Lady is a beguiling, experimental mixture of biography, fiction and family history. In her excellent memoir Girl with Dove (2018), she wrote about her neglected childhood in the coastal Sussex town of Littlehampton. Here she returns to the same locality, but considers her forebears, embroidering episodes from her own rackety childhood
