Society

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

AI has helped make 'parasocial' the word of the year

‘After having thrown a sheep six times from the top of a tower,’ reported the Gloucester Journal in 1784, ‘Montgolfier prevailed upon a man to try the experiment, which was performed with the utmost safety.’ The trick was done thanks to ‘a machine called a parachute’. Within weeks, a kind of hat called the Parachute Bonnet became the craze. An alternative to the Parachute Bonnet was the Lunardi, named after the ‘Daredevil Aeronaut’ Vincenzo Lunardi. In 1785 Robert Burns berated a louse for exercising on ‘Miss’s fine Lunardi, fye!/ How daur ye do ’t?’. Lunardi made an ascent before 200,000 people on 15 September 1784 in a hydrogen balloon, with

Sarah Perry

Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to. It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I

Christopher Howse

From Evelyn Waugh to Elizabeth Day, The Spectator's enduring place in fiction

There are decades when The Spectator is shorthand for a trait: sex (2000s), young fogeys (1980s), free trade (1900s). But I was surprised to find Henry James, a writer not given to shorthand, deploying the magazine’s name to give a sketch of Isabel Archer, the title character of his Portrait of a Lady: ‘She had had everything a girl could have: kindness, admiration, bonbons, bouquets, the sense of exclusion from none of the privileges of the world she lived in, abundant opportunity for dancing, plenty of new dresses, the London Spectator, the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.’ ‘That half-page is

Lara Prendergast

Snobbery is the best weapon against screen time

I can’t be the only neurotic mother to have rejoiced when the Princess of Wales revealed recently that she has a strict ‘no phones at the table’ rule. The Prince of Wales then later let slip that Prince George, who is 12, isn’t allowed a smartphone. When George eventually does get a phone, William added, it will be a brick without the internet – similar, one imagines, to the sort favoured by drug dealers. Hallelujah! Up until now, the best line for parents to trot out has been the old chestnut that ‘Silicon Valley guys send their children to schools where the tech use is unbelievably moderate because they know

Bonnie Blue

I stand with Nigel Farage

I have sweet memories of Christmas. My dad is proper old-school and would set up the video recorder. I don’t think we’ve ever watched the footage; I don’t know if he was even filming. But we couldn’t do anything until it was filmed. We never had loads of money, but Mum always went above and beyond. There was gold wrapping paper for presents from Santa. My family say I’m impossible to buy for now I’m better off. This year, I’ve asked for Disney princess pyjamas. Christmas is a time for me to give back. Last Christmas was a bit of a shock. I was due to be in Australia but

Andrew Roberts

How Göring almost derailed the Nuremberg Trials

The new movie Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Rami Malek as his US Army psychiatrist, has had mixed reviews. The Spectator’s Jonathan Maitland hated it, describing it as an ‘obscenely ill-judged two hours’ filled with ‘egregious errors of taste, decency and judgment’. Some critics have given it four stars, but Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian called Malek’s performance ‘an eye-rolling, enigmatic–smiling, scenery-nibbling hamfest which makes it look as if Malek is auditioning for the role of Hitler in The Producers’. The key scene comes when the American chief counsel Robert H. Jackson (played by Michael Shannon) fails to break Göring in the witness box, and the British

Madeline Grant

Do we really need a 'new spin' on Jane Austen?

If you like your period dramas butchered, then you are in for a real treat. The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth falls on 16 December, and we are promised a slew of adaptations, documentaries and lectures to mark it. Inevitably, some of these will try to put a ‘new spin’ on Austen, to make out that she was somehow in line with a particular cause or interest of modernity; Mansfield Park is about saving the whales, Colonel Brandon is actually trans, that sort of thing. This year, Emma Thompson stars in a ‘racy’ new audio drama, Becoming Meg Dashwood, which will focus on the youngest Dashwood sister and her

Andrew Strauss

My advice to Ben Stokes

In preparation for the 2005 Ashes series, the late Graham Thorpe, a man I looked up to enormously, turned to me and uttered the immortal words: ‘Straussy, there is Test cricket and Ashes cricket. They are completely different things.’ Never has a truer sentence been spoken. The Ashes breaks out of the normal cricket bubble. It means more than cricket: this is a biennial arm-wrestle with the respective sporting reputations of two enormously proud nations on the line. The prize is a little urn but also bragging rights for the next two years. The result of the Ashes, whether positive or negative, invokes an intense emotional response. It makes people

James MacManus

My lasting friendship with a disgraced MI6 officer

After a stellar career in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), better known as MI6, an unassuming man with a passion for bridge and a taste for malt whisky was in line to become head of that service, or ‘C’. The year was 1990. Roger Horrell was the favoured candidate to assume control of Britain’s foreign intelligence service. Roger had been a friend since we met in Africa some 20 years earlier. I knew him as an MI6 officer but had no idea that he was destined to become Britain’s master spy. Looking back at our regular club dinners in London, he may have hinted at his likely promotion but that

Steve Morris

Why is the modern Church embarrassed by angels?

One day while walking in Peckham Rye Park, William Blake saw angels sitting in the trees: ‘bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars’. He was eight years old. His fascination – some have called it obsession – with angels lasted for the rest of his life. When he sat to have his portrait painted by Thomas Phillips, the two men began to argue about who painted a better angel, Michelangelo or Raphael. Phillips, not unreasonably, suggested that since Blake had never seen even an engraving by Michelangelo, he was not qualified to give an opinion on the matter. ‘But I speak from the opinion of a friend who could

David Mamet

Why Charlie Kirk was a modern prophet

Most of us indulge in mild fortune-telling. We think ‘If the light changes before I count to five, I’ll get the job’ or ‘If the solitaire hand comes out my tests will be negative’, and so on. We understand prophecy as the ability to foretell the future. But biblically, prophecy was not prediction but castigation. And prophets were those who were inspired by God to describe the present. Dr King, Malcolm X and Charlie Kirk were modern prophets. Their lives and speech forced the populace to confront the unacceptable and obvious, which is why they were killed. Mass murderers and political assassins are incapable of facing the truth that their

Matthew Parris

Why we are all solipsists

I once tried to write a novel but lacking any ear for dialogue or skill at characterisation, I abandoned the attempt. The plot, though, was quite good. A couple on a smallholding are facing hard times. Their farm is failing. Daily life is shot through with anxiety, and they retreat increasingly into their interior worlds. Alone at night the husband keeps dreaming he’s in another place, a farm where he and his wife are happier, things go better, and life is crowded with incident. Gradually he finds himself living for nightfall, retreating from domestic misery and awaiting only the next episode in a different life unfolding in his dreams: a

Peter Jones

How the Roman plebs made modern democracy

For otherwise healthy plebs in the Roman world, survival depended on the four ‘Fs’: farming (your sole source of food and money), fighting, family and friends. Everything else that made life worth living meant having some degree of control over your life, which could be summed up in the fifth ‘F’, freedom, or political equality. But the elite had little time for such goodwill towards men. For the plebs, there’s the rub. In the 40s bc, the historian Livy began writing a history of Rome from its foundation in 753 BC. It was first ruled by a series of seven kings (none actually Roman!) who were finally thrown out as

William Moore

Jung Chang: 'Nobody can be as evil as Mao'

No writer has done more than Jung Chang to bring the horrors of Maoist China to the attention of western readers. In her monumental memoir Wild Swans (1991), she recounted the Chinese Communist Revolution, the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution through the stories of her grandmother, her mother and herself. Its influence was enormous: Wild Swans sold more than 15 million copies, making it one of the best-selling non-fiction books of all time. In Mao: The Unknown Story (2005), co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, she blew apart decades of Chinese Communist party propaganda to reevaluate Mao as one of history’s greatest monsters, as bad, if not

Mary Wakefield

What England's old folk songs can teach us

I grew up in the 1980s but in many ways it was more like the 1880s. We lived with my grandmother on the Northumbrian coast and the routine of our days echoed the routines of her youth, perhaps her mother’s and grandmother’s, too. We were like an elephant family in an African game park, following our matriarch around ancient migratory routes, oblivious to the rise and fall of regimes outside. Lunch (no elbows on the table), a walk to the sea, sherry time (Amontillado dry); then my grandmother and my clever younger brother would play Piquet while the children of lesser focus played with the open fire. And we sang

Mark Millar

Labour has done more damage to our country than the Luftwaffe

I still hang out with the same two lovable crackheads I sat beside on the first day of primary school. I keep all the stubs from every concert I’ve ever been to. I meet the same school dads in the same pub on the same night every single week and my point is that I’m a creature of habit. It takes a lot to change my mind, but enough is enough. I’m ending a lifetime of support for my beloved Labour party as 2025 draws to a disastrous close. This nightmarish, totalitarian rabble has done more damage to our country than Margaret Thatcher and the Luftwaffe put together. Flushed with

Philip Hensher

The joy of a miserable literary Christmas

A Christmas Carol is pretty well unavoidable around now, with Little Women trailing somewhat behind. There’s no shortage of alternative literary Christmases among the classics, however, often less sweetly heartwarming and more invigoratingly grumpy. Nigel Molesworth, it will be remembered, foiled all attempts to inflict A Christmas Carol on him. ‘It is just that there is something about the Xmas Carol which makes paters and grown-ups read with grate XPRESION, and this is very embarassing [sic] for all.’ For the Molesworths among us, there are plenty of alternatives to be had. Sometimes these are depictions of Christmas where no Christmas should be occurring. Arnold Bennett’s sublime The Old Wives’ Tale

Angus Colwell

David Deutsch: The Enlightenment, 'irrational memes' and how Wikipedia turned woke

The Amazon reviews for David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity don’t alert you to the fact that this is a book on theoretical physics. They sound more like a weepy divorcé’s YouTube comments below a Mark Knopfler guitar solo. ‘I didn’t so much read it,’ says one. ‘It read me.’ ‘I was honestly sad when it was over,’ writes another. ‘This book changed my way of seeing the world, politics, science and, most importantly, of seeing what I will understand as containing some truth.’ When I talk to Deutsch – one of the most sensationally interesting theoretical physicists of our age – on Zoom, I see two beady eyes peering

Lionel Shriver

Discrimination is good, actually

Many years ago, a friend described one of my serious literary novels as ‘clever’. I was offended – but I shouldn’t have been. The friend was from across the pond, where I now understand ‘clever’ simply means smart. For Americans, cleverness infers a shallow, facile intelligence. Applied to people, it often hints at sly, calculating deviousness or cunning. It has no positive moral qualities, as westerners understand them. Tax evasion can be ‘clever’. Let’s move on to ‘culture’ – a big, fuzzy word we throw about with careless abandon that often summons images of traditional clothing and cuisine. But, parsed in its most profound sense, culture might best be defined