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‘War and the village wives’, from The Spectator, 15 August 1914: The men and women of the village are talking unceasingly about the war. The whole aspect of the place is changed. The English silence is broken. Even on Sunday no one lolls and smokes in speechless reflection. All the men read the newspapers; none
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From ‘The German military mind’, The Spectator, 15 August 1914: All Englishmen are now agreed that Germany made the war, and that the moving force within the German nation was and is German militarism. The astonishing thing is in looking back is that any one here should have doubted what would happen if we either
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From the Barometer in this week’s Spectator. Home Office minister Mark Simmonds resigned this week, complaining he couldn’t afford to live in London on his junior minister’s salary of £89,435. His resignation echoes that of Lord Gowrie, who resigned as minister for the arts in September 1985 complaining he couldn’t live in London on £33,000
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‘War and the press’, from The Spectator, 15 August 1914: When Mr Churchill paid a high compliment in the House of Commons to the British newspapers he said no more than was deserved. The newspapers are now under control by law, and we need not specially praise them for a reticence and a public spirit
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From our UK edition
‘I only have to watch this programme and I put weight on!’
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‘Please, relax — I’m a very qualified surgeon and Mr and Mrs Piggy have yet to make a mistake.’
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From our UK edition
‘Isn’t it great not having anything to wear?’
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From our UK edition
‘He’s a prolific media commentator.’
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From our UK edition
‘A hundred lines, Miss? But I’ll be out of my tree!’
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‘They’re in some kind of feeding frenzy.’
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‘I take it this is your first literary festival.’
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Hamas’s human shields Sir: Unlike the rockets fired at Basra air base by Iraqi fighters (Tom Drife, Letters, 9 August), rockets from Gaza aim to kill Israeli civilians. A more accurate analogy would be if English cities were under attack by thousands of rockets from Scotland. Any country under such attack would try to destroy
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Ministerial needs Home Office minister Mark Simmonds resigned, complaining he couldn’t afford to live in London on his junior minister’s salary of £89,435. His resignation echoes that of Lord Gowrie, who resigned as minister for the arts in September 1985 complaining he couldn’t live in London on £33,000 a year. Are ministers better off now
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Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, resisted calls for Parliament to be recalled to debate the crisis in Iraq. Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said that the government was not considering military intervention ‘at the present time’. Mark Simmonds resigned as a Foreign Office minister, but Downing Street hastened to say that his resignation, unlike Lady Warsi’s
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The old cliché that ‘nothing happens in August’ has again been brutally disproved. From the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war to the Russian invasion of Georgia six years ago, August is a month often packed with violence — but rarely more so than this year. In Syria, Christians are being crucified
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