Society

Saturday

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

Roger Alton

Could two great managers bring us two World Cup wins?

Maybe it’s the time of the year, or maybe it’s down to my sad little life, but surely I can’t be alone in feeling my spirits lifted by the example that Steve Borthwick and Thomas Tuchel are setting. The managers of England’s rugby and football teams have displayed courage, vision and a higher morality that could usefully be followed in other areas – politics, certainly, or business. Both came under fire in the early days of their management and stood resolutely firm. Model stuff surely. What Tuchel has done with his England side is a proper lesson for life. He has decided on a course of action – picking the

Doc

Christmas crossword

The unclued lights consist of seven themed categories A to G (with G being interpreted very loosely) which are highlighted in yellow in the grid. Each themed category leads to six unclued theme words A to F, one of two words and another hyphened. Across 11    Bishop always upset item in bar (5) 13    Drink Church of Scotland finally banned (3) 16    Knight upset silver hay-cart (6) 18    Friends from abroad three-quarters down the list. That’s wrong (5) 20    Walk in west and east parts of Paris (4) 26    After parking drink in enclosed area (4) 29    Corrie character not born in France taking extra time (4) 30    Seabird

The Spectator

2730: Herrlines - solution

The unclued lights yield five phrases in German, all listed in one of the appendices in Chambers 13th edition: 1A, 17&31, 19D&18A, 37&30 and 43&29. First prize Diane Saxon, Stockport Runners-up Patrick Macdougall, London SW6; Martin Plews and Anne Greenwood, Horsham, W. Sussex

Victoria Lane

Spectator Competition: Write Christmas

Competition 3429 invited you to tell the story of the Nativity in the style of a well-known writer. There were very many excellent passages, enough to fill this column three times over, but as it is the £25 vouchers go to the following. Thanks for all your lovely entries this year and happy Christmas one and all. To begin at a new beginning: he was birthed, berthed in a barn with gert bulks of shifting, breathy beasts. Joseph would sooner have been up the pub, sheets to the wind, but it was no more the establishment to encourage the fulfilment of dreams than prophecies. At his own wordless dreamings, the

Luke McShane

No. 879

Martirosyan-Yilmaz, European Individual Championship 2025. Black has just pushed his pawn to c4, overlooking a crucial tactic. Martirosyan’s next move decided the game. What did he play? Email answers to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 22 December. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery. Last week’s solution 1 a8=N! Kg2 2 Nb6! and regardless of Black’s response, 3 a8=Q or a8=B is mate

Luke McShane

Twelve questions for Christmas

1) A pair of jeans fetched $36,100 at a charity auction in March. Whose were they, and what was special about them? 2) In April, Tunde Onakoya and Shawn Martinez set a Guinness World Record for the longest chess marathon, playing in New York’s Times Square. How long did they last? 3) ‘In chess, the optimal state when you’re playing a game is somewhere between optimistic and delusionally optimistic. Because if you’re realistic, you’re just never going to be opportunistic enough to exploit your opponent’s mistakes.’ So said Magnus Carlsen during an interview with a famous podcaster this year. Which one? 4) Chess has a long history of running afoul

Christopher Howse

The Spectator's 2025 Christmas quiz

Events, dear boy In 2025: 1. Name the singer of ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ whose concert in Perth, Australia, was cancelled because a fatberg had blocked a main sewer. 2. What hub of intelligence did Blaise Metreweli take over? 3. In which capital city did state media warn people weighing less than 8st to stay at home during a spell of windy weather? 4. A swarm of what shut down a nuclear power station at Gravelines in France? 5. At the end of a summit in Alaska, who said in English: ‘Next time in Moscow’? 6. Why did Aalborg Zoo in Denmark appeal for guinea pigs