Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
The highlight of the year I spent as a postgraduate at Harvard was a speech given by Tom Wolfe to the graduating class of 1988. His theme was the decline of Christianity in America and the extraordinary freedom that had given rise to. Until quite recently in American history, he argued, people’s personal behaviour had
For several years now, I’ve been going to Cornwall for a week during the Easter Holidays — usually to Bude in North Cornwall. Bude has the advantage of being working class and unpretentious, so you’re unlikely to bump into any Guardian readers. My children and I can sit on the beach, tucking into our McDonald’s
On a warm summer evening in 1986, the crème-de-la-crème of London’s literary establishment met at Antonia Fraser’s house in Holland Park to discuss how they could bring about the downfall of Margaret Thatcher. Among their number were Harold Pinter, Ian McEwan, John Mortimer, David Hare, Margaret Drabble, Michael Holroyd, Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, who
According to a new survey commissioned by the BBC, Britain is now divided into seven different social classes. The good news, dear reader, is that you’re almost certainly at the top of the pyramid in the class the BBC calls the ‘social elite’. Members of this group own houses worth, on average, £325,000 and their
On the face of it, Game of Thrones doesn’t look very good. The HBO television series, based on a sequence of fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin, is set in a fictional, medieval kingdom called Westeros where various ambitious men do battle for the Iron Throne. It features dragons, zombies and dwarves, and has a
‘What are you writing?’ I asked my nine-year-old daughter as she sat at the kitchen table doing her homework. ‘A recount,’ she said. ‘What’s a recount?’ She looked at me with utter disdain. ‘Duh! A recount.’ I calmly explained that you could recount an event in a piece of writing, but that didn’t make what
Just before Vicky Pryce was sentenced on Monday, her QC made a plea for clemency on the grounds that the case had already ‘undermined her professional position considerably’. In other words, she’d been punished enough and to send her to prison would be excessive. But had the judge felt sympathy for Pryce on account of
I feel a twinge of pity for Prince Alwaleed bin Talal — and it’s not often you can say that about a billionaire Saudi businessman. According to Forbes, he’s worth $20 billion, making him the 26th richest man in the world. But is he? The prince has disputed this estimate of his net worth, claiming
Not a day passes in which I don’t regret firing Irena. She was my ‘daily’ from 1991 to 2004. I don’t think I could have asked for anyone better qualified. Until she came to work for me she had been a professor of geology at a Russian university, but she lost her job when the
I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic
One of the downsides of getting older is witnessing your friends and acquaintances being honoured in various ways. I don’t just mean knighthoods and peerages, I also mind the little things — an entry in Who’s Who, for instance, or an honorary degree from a red-brick university. It’s reached such a point that I daresay
One of my reasons for coming to Kenya was to visit Tango Maus, the farm of Spectator ‘Wild life’ columnist Aidan Hartley. I’ve read so much about this mystical place —the skirmishes with the local elephant population, the troublesome livestock, the Gunga Din-like farm manager — that I was dying to see it. And having
Before setting off for Kenya, where I’m spending six weeks helping The Spectator’s ‘Wild life’ columnist, Aidan Hartley, set up a school, I worried about the safety of my family. Would I be exposing my wife and four children to danger? I’d heard a lot of horror stories about violent crimes committed against the white
I was at a petrol station in Nakuru, a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley, when I experienced my first moment of genuine terror since arriving in Africa. I was standing in a queue, waiting to pay, when a crowd of about 500 locals suddenly invaded the garage forecourt. They were campaigning for one of the
Driving round Kenya, I’m constantly struck by the sheer number of schools. Every 500 yards there’s a hand-painted sign advertising the virtues of some ‘academy’ or other. The truly remarkable thing is that at least 10 per cent boast of teaching the ‘British curriculum’. The reason this is remarkable isn’t just because there’s no such
I’m currently in Kenya with my wife and four children and have just returned from the coast where we spent four nights at the Serena Hotel in Mombasa. My only complaint is that all the DVDs in the Kids’ Club were pirate copies — a bit off, considering the hotel is owned by the Aga
I’m currently in Kenya with my family where I’m planning to stay for the next seven weeks. The official reason is to help my friend Aidan Hartley set up a primary school in Laikipia, but I have another, less pious motive. Last June, Aidan arranged for me to give a speech at Pembroke, his children’s
One of the things we’ll have to say goodbye to in 2013, if the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has its way, is Asperger’s Syndrome. In the forthcoming fifth edition of the APA’s reference work, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), Asperger’s has been ‘declassified’, that is, it’s no longer recognised as a
I’m writing this from a hotel room in Stockholm where I’ve been stranded for the last 24 hours thanks to bad weather. Turns out the Swedish airport authorities aren’t any better at coping with snow than ours — which is surprising given how often it must snow over here. Nevertheless, it has given me an
In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville identified ‘the tyranny of the majority’ as the main shortcoming of democratic societies. His fear was that the principle of majority rule could cross over from the political arena to the realm of ideas. After all, if being able to command the most votes is the main source
