An intelligent mix of culture, style, travel, food and property, as well as where to go and what to see.
It’s a famous theme in science fiction: the idea that, one day, humanity and the thinking machines will somehow go to war. It’s the narrative spine of The Terminator films. It’s implied in 2001, A Space Odyssey. You can find it in Neuromancer, The Hyperian Cantos, Ex Machina, The Creator and I, Robot (the Asimov
It was 10.45pm and our film had just finished. I checked my phone and saw a friend claiming he had just seen the northern lights — in Wembley. It had been trailed as a possibility, but I hadn’t given it much credence. Not with the light pollution inside the M25, surely. You’d need to head
Perhaps it was the anachronistic use of the term ‘gentlemen’ that finally put paid to the idea of the gentlemen’s club. If only these illustrious institutions had thought to rename themselves ‘cis-male inner-city safe spaces’, we probably wouldn’t be looking on aghast as another centuries old tradition is summarily flushed down the memory hole. Strange
Back in February, a friend forwarded me a profound and joyous article written by Simon Boas about his terminal cancer diagnosis. (I knew Simon a little at university, where he was both much cleverer and much cooler than me). Originally published in the Jersey Evening Post, it’s since been reproduced here, and seems to have, as
Among the many appreciations of C.J. Sansom, the author of bestselling historical mysteries who died last week aged 71, one of the most eloquent came from Rear Admiral John Lippiett. A friend since Sansom first researched the sinking of Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose (Lippiett headed the Mary Rose Trust in Portsmouth after he
Harry and Meghan are at it again – launching themselves into another rebrand – this time embarking on a faux-royal tour to Nigeria, hiring new PR staff in the UK, promoting strawberry jam on Instagram and – good grief! – touting Netflix shows about friendship and polo. There’s a certain sadness about this latest effort,
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Sean Thomas worries that Paris has lost some of its charm (1:21); Kara Kennedy reports on US-style opioids arriving in Britain (8:43); Philip Hensher describes how an affair which ruined one woman would be the making of another (15:32); Damian Thompson reflects on his sobriety and his battle with British
Russell Brand was baptised on Sunday, he says – in the River Thames, despite his tongue-in-cheek fear of catching a virus – and he’s thrilled about it. He thanked those who embraced his decision, while expressing understanding of those who are cynical. He’s not perfect, he explains; he knows he’s going to make mistakes, but
Everything is trauma. From Barbie’s Oscars snub (very traumatic) to Taylor Swift’s new album (also deeply traumatic), profound emotional distress appears to be everywhere. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), trauma requires ‘actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence’. A horrific car crash, a terrorist attack, an armed robbery, these all fit the bill. An
I gave Taylor Swift’s new album, The Tortured Poets Department (which I need to stop calling The Dead Poets Society) a cursory listen on Friday morning, a few hours after it was released. Maybe it was because I listened to half of the self-indulgent songs while walking my dog through a moody forest before I’d had any human
Not everyone likes The Beatles. That said, trashing cultural icons is a modern phenomenon amplified by social media and done, largely, to attract attention. Yet whether you hate them or love them (yeah, yeah, yeah), their influence on pretty much everything pop music has offered since is, surely, undeniable. Sixty years ago they left an
An exhibition dedicated to 20th century British crime fiction has opened at Cambridge University Library. The artefacts on show range widely through the history of the genre, from items associated Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle right up to modern exponents of the form, Val McDermid and Ian Rankin. Lurking somewhere in many of
María Branyas Morera, aged 117, is the oldest person in the world. She was born in California on 4 March 1907 to Spanish parents who decided to return home in 1915. The voyage was an early lesson in adversity: her father died and María lost the hearing in one ear after she fell from the
Last week, an old acquaintance went viral. Charles Withers had, according to his pregnant wife, disappeared around a year ago, leaving her to bring up one young child alone with another on the way. The pretty Massachusetts blonde posted a plea for information on Facebook. It was, she wrote, surprisingly difficult to divorce someone who refused to return
In the dog days of 2021, I spent a grey Sunday afternoon driving around a part of London with a view to an eventual flat move. Why take the car? Because the bus routes didn’t match where I planned to go, I wanted to stay over ground, and I would be able to cover more
What do we talk about when we talk about Marilyn Monroe? Sex, death and everything in between. Unlike other legendary film stars from Garbo to Bardot, Monroe has become (to use that awful and over-popular word) ‘iconic’ – which is ‘problematic’ in itself. Being recognisable as a hank of blonde hair and a white dress failing
When you’re playing a word game, don’t you sometimes feel how horribly unfair it is that players who know more words prosper? Wouldn’t it be better to have word games that didn’t rely so heavily on knowledge of the dictionary, that weren’t so, y’know, wordy? And, come to that, wouldn’t a kindler, gentler sort of
In my experience, men offer this infuriating comeback when challenged about the continuing exclusion of women from clubs such as the Garrick (for now at least – the Garrick is voting on 7 May on the admission of women as members). ‘But why don’t you set up your own women-only clubs,’ they sulk, ‘and leave
Every year at the beginning of April, I tell myself I must top up my Isa before the 5 April deadline. And all my friends tell me I must. My financial adviser tells me I must. Articles in the press and adverts on social media tell me I must. And every year on 6 April
Jimmy Donaldson, more commonly known as MrBeast, is the world’s most successful YouTuber. More than 250 million people follow his channel. His videos are mostly absurd challenges involving obscene amounts of cash generated from his YouTube advertising revenue. In one video, he eats $100,000 worth of gold leaf ice cream; in another, he pays a
The Peaceable Kingdom probably isn’t the first place you would have looked for Kurt Cobain. Of all the ironies and confusions of his brief life, perhaps none was as pointed as his choosing to kill himself in a room overlooking that sign, announcing Seattle’s upscale Leschi neighbourhood, with its views of Lake Washington and the
Whenever I write about AI on The Spectator (which is a lot) I always get comments like ‘Yawn. Wake me up when AI actually does something’. And, to a point, these are fair comments. For all its remarkable feats, its photos of Shakespeare with weird fingers, its videos of dogs typing in spacesuits, the new
There’s a spectre floating inside the head of a certain type of young woman. It’s the fast-talking, sex-realist American academic Camille Paglia. She was big in the 1990s but my parents haven’t heard of her. ‘Did she write Fear of Flying?’ asks my dad. On sections of the internet she has become a folk hero.
For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month than most, since it was on 8 April 32 years ago that the last edition collapsed, exhausted, on to the newspaper stands. By then it was way past its best, but in its day it
The old should envy the young; it’s part of the natural order of things. When I was young, I was gloriously aware that old people (anyone over 30) envied me; though I was a virgin until I went to That London at 17, my mum and her mates thought I was up to all sorts
Pin yourself to the spinning wheel as the knife thrower aims his blades. Take a Northern Soul twirl on the talcum-powdered floor. Play ‘With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ on George Formby’s banjolele. At last popular entertainment, from Sooty to Strictly, is being given its rightful part on the nation’s stage. These fabulous artforms,
Recently, I was walking down a London street when on the pavement I spotted a worm. It was so motionless I wasn’t sure if it was alive or dead. Normally, I would have passed the worm by without a second thought. But I’d just been to my local park to do stretches, meditation, breathing exercises
It’s not easy being a Leaver, right now. For a start, the government that actually delivered Brexit – the present Tory government – is facing a one-sided electoral hammering which will make the Anglo-Zanzibar war of 1896 (duration: 38 minutes) look like a tense, nail-biting score draw. In the same vein, polls consistently show high
Attending an English public school in the 1970s when you weren’t from that world was a tough gig. Mum’s family were from the East End. Dad was what might euphemistically be called a ‘wheeler dealer’. Having had little education, Dad was determined his children wouldn’t suffer the same fate. So my brother and I were