Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. His detailed accounts of the media attacks on Lionel Shriver and Toby Young can be read on his substack ‘Letting the Child Run Riot.’
The news that WHSmith is facing closure seemed inevitable. Good stationery may be one of the pleasures of life, but is anyone actually buying much any more? Of course, people will always need pens, string, bubble wrap and so on, yet the heyday of stationery has definitely passed. There was a time, when people still
Things are currently looking choppy for Kemi Badenoch. Polls last weekend were bad enough, seven of them showing Reform leading the Conservatives by a point. But now it seems this gap may have widened dramatically. A poll on Thursday showed Reform pushing the Tories in to third place, with Farage’s party on 25 per cent
Monopoli, Puglia Monopoli is an elegant little seaside town in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, and in summer it’s unbearable. Tourists flock from everywhere. Squares you could normally zip through in a few seconds take ten minutes to cross, and the queues for Bella Blu, the ice cream parlour in Piazza Garibaldi, remind
As Holocaust Remembrance Day comes round again, actual remembrance of the Holocaust seems fainter than ever. The arson attacks on synagogues in France and Australia, the mass-assault on Israeli football supporters in Holland last autumn, or the shocking recent scenes at the Oxford Union, where Jewish speakers were taunted, booed and sworn at by the
Will we ever tire of the Cambridge spies? Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Burgess and Maclean – and to a lesser extent John Caincross, the fifth man in the circle – are names as familiar to us now as certain brands of detergent or the line-up of the Beatles. To compliment the countless books, dramas and
On a recent trip with my daughter to Trieste, the north Italian seaside city on the border with Slovenia, I thought it would be nice to take her to Café Sacher for some sachertorte, which has been in culinary fashion since its creation in 1832. Trieste, once a thriving Austro-Hungarian port, is as reminiscent of
Narva, the northern Estonian city right on the border with Russia, has been much in the news of late. Not only is it where the Estonians expect any Russian invasion to take place – most of the rest of the frontier passes straight through the middle of Lake Peipus – but it has also become
Look at any list of the ‘greatest ever romcoms’ and you’ll find When Harry Met Sally near the top of the list, if not heading it. This 1989 movie, directed by Rob Reiner and written by the late Nora Ephron – with terrific performances from Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan as the title characters –
Anyone without time to read an author’s long works (most of us these days) might want to consider simply going to the top of the tree and reading their table-talk instead. Conversations with Writers, a series of books from the University of Mississippi Press, has hundreds of titles featuring collected interviews with different authors, from
If someone were to read the runes, this first Labour Christmas would not augur well. Not only have we had Keir Starmer’s excruciating ‘illuminations countdown’ in Downing Street – a joyless event if ever there was one – but also the cut-price Christmas Tree in Trafalgar Square – perhaps the mangiest conifer the Norwegians, in
Readers of The Spectator may remember the 2021 defenestration of author and teacher Kate Clanchy, which saw her part company with her publisher Pan Macmillan. This was after whole extracts of her award-winning book Some Children I Taught and What They Taught Me were slated for rewriting, more or less at the behest of a
In the weeks since Donald Trump won the US election, Democrat supporters, amidst much gnashing of teeth, have offered up a range of post-mortems. While The View host Sunny Hostin and MSNBC presenter Joy Reid have blamed Kamala’ Harris’s defeat, predictably enough, on American ‘racism’ and ‘misogyny’, others have been more constructive. Last week, onetime
Withnail and I’s Uncle Monty found it crushing to realise that he was never going to be given the part of Hamlet – ‘I shall never play the Dane!’ – for many of us, an equal disappointment is realising, sooner or later, that we’ll probably die uninvited onto Desert Island Discs. This programme has run
In the weeks since Rachel Reeves’s Budget and its shock attack on agricultural property relief, we’ve seen various armchair pundits pontificate on farmers’ lives – a source of mounting exasperation for farmers themselves. The peak of pundit-on-ploughman contempt came, unsurprisingly, from LBC’s James O’Brien First, there have been the panicky announcements from the government –
Finally a date has been set – 29 January 2025 – for the government to debate points posed by the now infamous ‘Call a General Election’ petition. ‘I would like there to be another General Election,’ reads the blurb on the website. ‘I believe the current Labour government have gone back on the promises they
After Donald Trump’s election-win, many junkies of US politics will be needing another fix. But if you’ve already overdosed on Megyn Kelly post-mortems on YouTube or had your fill of Estee Palti’s Kamala imitations, where do you go to head off the pangs till inauguration day next year? Anyone without time for the entire West
Arriving in Blackpool by train is just as I’d always dreamed. At the Pleasure Beach station, I disembarked right by the roller coasters, which rear up like Welsh hills beside you and, with the seagulls, welcome you with shrieking riders and clattering wheels. There are vast coasters in wood and metal weaving in and out
This year, as almost every year, there have been calls for a complete ban on boxing. Two fighters, Ardi Ndembo and Sherif Lawal, have died as a result of the sport since April, with more than twenty meeting the same end in the last decade alone. Steve Bunce, BBC’s ‘voice of boxing’, seemed in a
A consensus seems to be forming, with unreasonable speed, that Kemi Badenoch isn’t exactly smashing it at Prime Minister’s Questions. Much of the harsher criticism comes from expected quarters – ‘Tory Gloom as Gaffe-Prone Kemi Badenoch Endures Another Miserable PMQs’ says a headline in the Huffington Post, while John Crace snarks in the Guardian that
One of the freedoms of later life, if you’re not Keith Richards, is that you no longer have to worry about being cool. Cool, far more than money, is the currency of youth, and as a teenager I knew who had it and who didn’t. But what was cool, all those decades ago? Who possessed
