31 min listen
On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Katy Balls reflects on the UK general election campaign and wonders how bad things could get for the Tories (1:02); Gavin Mortimer argues that France’s own election is between the ‘somewheres’ and the ‘anywheres’ (7:00); Sean Thomas searches for authentic travel in Colombia (13:16); after reviewing the books Great Britain?
The Tory era is not (quite) over yet, but already the obituaries are in. In particular, two new books from Torsten Bell and Paul Collier seek to bury not just Rishi Sunak and his cabinet but the whole economic approach that the Conservatives have taken since 2010, or perhaps even 1979. Let’s start with Bell
James Heale speaks to Fraser Nelson and Robert Colvile from the Centre for Policy Studies about today’s migration figures, which hit a record high yet still came in lower than expected.
41 min listen
On this week’s podcast: For the cover of the magazine Kate Andrews assesses the politics of panic, and the fallout of last week’s so-called fiscal event. She is joined by Robert Colvile, director of the Centre for Policy Studies think tank to discuss where the Conservatives go from here (00:57). Also this week: Does the
Ah well. It was a nice try. A few years ago I wrote a book called The Great Acceleration, arguing that the world around us is speeding up and that this is on balance a good thing. Enter Danny Dorling with a new book called Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration and Why it’s
Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected images from YouTube. The computer churned through them, and announced that it kept finding these strange things with furry faces. It had, in other words, discovered cats. Artificial intelligence has, all of a sudden, become
Back in 1997 the New Yorker published a piece lampooning the proliferation of ‘Notes on the Type’ — those oleaginous mini-essays informing us that ‘this book was set in Backslap Grotesque Italic Semi-Detached, a variant of Bangalore Torpedo Moribund adapted in 1867 from a matrice by the Danish chiseller Espy Sans, a character if ever
The race to be London Mayor is the biggest personality contest in politics. And one personality looms largest: George Galloway, back from Bradford and seeking his fortune on the capital’s streets. In his public appearances, the Respect party leader has been on his usual bombastic form. But dig a little deeper, and it becomes apparent
