Culture Archives

Who gives us ‘breathing space?’

The government jargon-turning mills must have rung to cheers of delight when the phrase breathing space was minted. Its glory is to suggest a dawn in which it is bliss to be alive, but without tying anyone down to vulgar sums. The Chancellor has said the Budget will give households more “breathing space.” Is that breathing space on a wide sunny upland or is it a dark, uncertain air pocket in a capsized yacht? I was surprised to find how old the phrase is. George Joye was consoled in the 1540s that God (not the chancellor) “at some certain season giveth a little breathing space to his chirche, making the fyerce seas cawme for a little tyme.” There, space denotes time.

Robin Simon

The RA’s triumphant new exhibition

What a show at the Royal Academy. You go straight into a room of Cezannes and Renoirs and that is how it continues, with one coup de théâtre after another, at the hands of Monet, Signac, Braque, Matisse, Derain, Bonnard and more, all of them in thrall to the astonishing light and color of the Côte d’Azur. It hadn’t always been like that. These artists, Cezanne excepted, came from northern France and knew nothing about the southern coast. What changed it all was the completion of the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée railway in 1860, which suddenly made this spectacular seaside accessible. Cezanne was from neighboring Provence, and he arrived on the coast before anyone else.

Richard Bratby

Opera’s obsession with the Eastern bloc

There was a fad a while back for photo books about Eastern bloc architecture. Derelict megastructures, brutalist monuments; you couldn’t move for them in the Barbican gift shop. Anyhow, Patrick Nolan and Leslie Travers – the director and designer respectively of Opera North’s new production of Eugene Onegin – were presumably big fans, because they’ve relocated the action to a provincial sports centre in the dying years of the USSR. It’s a fairly common gambit with Slavic operas. British opera companies are surely world leaders, by now, at rendering faded paintwork and water-stained concrete. But why?

Ivo Delingpole

Gen Z is falling for the Soviet Union

The USSR is striking back. Nearly forty years after its collapse, there are a growing number of young people in the West who are now avid enthusiasts of the Soviet Union. Curiously, this is a somewhat apolitical phenomenon. Lenin and Stalin apologism still remains the preserve of the chubby, the slobby, the grizzled and the graduate student, no matter how avidly they wave their flags at protests. Instead, Soviet culture and style have become decidedly in vogue, whether that be the resurgence of the Slavic doll look, schoolboys making TikToks to the USSR national anthem, or viral videos of abandoned Communist buildings. Defanged and denuded of its political belief system, Soviet aesthetics are decidedly cool.

October 29, 2026

Melanie McDonagh

Why continuation novels need to end

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was, at the end of his life, a committed Spiritualist, and so knew all about authors writing posthumously from the Other Side. But he might still have been taken aback by Sherlock, a book of short stories which has a profile of the great man on the cover in his distinctive deerstalker and meerschaum. Closer inspection shows it to be “authorized by the Conan Doyle Estate” rather than authored by A. Conan Doyle, but the reader’s first response is, goodness, is there more Sherlock out there? It’s a bid by the literary estates of the authors to squeeze more from their authors once the original copyright expires At second glance, you see: “Ten New Stories, Ten Incredible Writers; the Game is Afoot…Again.

October 28, 2026

Julie Burchill

RIP Jennifer Lawrence’s face

It was another Jennifer – Jennifer Grey of Dirty Dancing fame – whose desire to tamper with the face that the good Lord gave her made her the object lesson in not fixing what ain’t broke; especially, in her case, one’s nose. At the age of 26 Miss Grey was pretty enough to be believable as the teenage paramour of heart-throb Patrick Swayze in the wildly popular film, but not so pretty that she alienated the female majority of the potential audience. She was the perfect rising star. But a totally pointless nose-job two years later, and a second procedure to allegedly fix an issue with the cartilage, so altered her appearance that it made her unrecognizable.

Sean Thomas

The town where Europe committed suicide

Have you ever heard of Gorizia? Probably not, and yet it is decidedly pretty. It sits in the far northeastern corner of Italy, where the Latin map frays into the Slavic. The center is all pink arcades, pistachio green shutters, and palazzi painted in faded yellow. Beyond everything is the great pale wall of the Julian Alps. The town has had at least three names – Gorizia, Görz, Gorica – because for centuries it was Habsburg, then Austro-Hungarian. That is to say: it was a quintessentially multilingual city, full of Italians, Slovenes, Friulians, Germans and Jews, halfway between Trieste and Vienna. Some called it the “Austrian Nice.” Imperial officials came here to die of tranquil old age.

October 23, 2026

James Barr

‘There’s a 50-50 chance I’ll get bumped off’: an American scholar foresees his death

On a drizzly morning in January 1984, Malcolm Kerr, the president of the American University of Beirut (AUB), was walking from the lift toward his office on the campus when he was shot dead. His two assailants escaped. In 2020 Kerr’s widow Ann read Kim Ghattas’s book on Islamic extremism, Black Wave, and sent her an email:. “I would like to hear your thoughts about what lay behind Malcolm’s death. I wonder if you have more detailed information.” Ghattas started hunting. Through the Kerrs’ and other stories she evokes the nauseous uncertainty of civil war Beirut – a place where people vanished and the Reagan administration came thoroughly unstuck. At the beginning of the 1980s the Kerrs were living in California, where Malcolm taught at UCLA.

Stuart Kelly

Alternative universes: Exit Party, by Emily St. John Mandel, reviewed

The premise of this novel is weird and delightful. At a party in the year 2031, with the American civil war over and the Republic of California declared, it’s time to pop the corks in Los Angeles. Our protagonist, Ari, is slightly wary: she is newly out of prison and declares: “When I think about parties I think about bombs.” This is the least of her worries, as in the inebriation she meets “the same woman she had seen earlier, wearing a silver pleated dress, but she’d changed into casual clothes now, jean shorts and a T-shirt”. Moreover, some people are calling her Ibari – “My legal name... I’ve literally never used it. It’s just the name on my ID.” At the same party, the host disappears, and not just to stock up on the drinks.

Alan Judd

How Sweden has kept communism at bay

Stay-behind cells in World War Two and the Cold War are familiar to students of intelligence and military history. These were groups of men who, during an invasion, would hide in concealed bunkers from which they would clandestinely emerge to report on enemy positions, possibly also to sabotage them. There are still an unknown number of such hides, neglected and forgotten, in Kent and Sussex woodlands. During the Cold War, units of the British Army were tasked with occupying similar hides on the continent. None was expected to survive for long. It is less well known that neutral Sweden had a similar organization. It originated from several initiatives during World War Two, among them one called the Tuesday Club and another formed by Swedish intelligence called Homeland Stewardship.

October 21, 2026

Josh Sims

How bare knuckle fighting took over boxing

Anyone who watches the former IBF featherweight and Commonwealth boxing champion Lee Selby enter the ring for his next big fight, in London in November, may be forgiven for thinking all that being bashed around the head has left him with a touch of amnesia. It will seem as though he’s forgotten his gloves. In fact Selby – who remains as sharp as his jab – is simply partaking in his second career, as a bare knuckle boxer. For those not up with the increasingly esoteric world of sport, the sweet science of bruising, as traditional boxing was once called, is fast being over-shadowed by the sweet science of blood-letting.

October 12, 2026

Daniel Seifert

Email signatures are performative slop

Your last impression, as the sages tell us, is your lasting impression. Nowhere is this truer than the digital world, where email signatures – the little phrases or miscellanea that sit under each message proper – leave a particular taste in the mouth. You can file these flavors under the good, the bad and the baffling. (And the deadly; but we’ll get to that.) Let’s start with the good. One of my semi-regular contacts ends their missives by highlighting the book they’re currently reading. That’s a touch a rampant bibliophile can get behind. It allows me to coo “Aha, that looks like something I should add to the to-be-read pile,” or sneer at their taste as midwit piffle.

October 9, 2026

Alexander Larman

Is Digger Tom Cruise’s biggest flop yet?

Tom Cruise must be the most divisive big star in Hollywood. For everyone who salutes him as the last old-school movie icon, who has brought joy to millions, even billions, worldwide over a 40-year career, there are others who sneer at his Scientology faith, his supposed weirdness and many of the pictures that he has made. But his latest film Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, is something else altogether, and a rare example of where a picture’s obvious flop status does not mean that it is an uninteresting piece of cinema. Quite the reverse.

October 3, 2026

Lara Prendergast

How Boston became the cradle of American children’s literature

It was Labor Day in Boston and the bronze ducklings in the city’s Public Garden were each wearing a fluffy autumnal scarf. Nobody seems quite sure who dresses them, but at various points they have worn party hats, festive knitwear and hot pink. When the Tartan Army arrived for the World Cup earlier this year, Mrs. Mallard and her ducklings – Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack – were forced to endure miniature traffic cones and saltires. The sculpture was created by Nancy Schön in 1987 to celebrate Robert McCloskey’s 1941 children’s book, Make Way for Ducklings. In 1990, former Soviet first lady Raisa Gorbachev visited Boston and admired the statue.

October 2, 2026

Catriona Olding

Looking on the bright side of life with Eric Idle

Provence “Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.” This was 2009. I was visiting my old art teacher from school, Frank Docherty, and his wife, Chrissie, in the village of Montfort-sur-Argens. Eric had a house nearby, they said. They’d got to know one another a few years before when Eric had begun buying Frank’s surrealist paintings. I was too wee for early Python but as a teenager knew every line of The Life of Brian. And all the voices. I apologize now to anyone who was on late-night double-decker buses from Paisley to Glasgow in 1982.

October 1, 2026

Richard Bratby

When will I see a Carmen set in 19th-century Seville?

No critic sets out to be a reactionary, even though it’s much easier that way. There’s no real satisfaction in rejecting novelty on sight; no joy in measuring a living performance against your record collection and coming down, every time, in favor of the dead Nazi. I get that. Still, it’s a plain fact that in three decades of regular opera-going, I have never – not once – seen a live production of Carmen that locates the action in 19th-century Seville. Or one that centers the visual elements – mantillas, sunshine, picture-postcard Spanishness – that directors tell us (and how they tell us!) have become such clichés.

Joseph Morris

Inside the church of pipe smoking

I am a smoker. I can never be sure of the reaction I will get to those words nowadays, though I have hope that Spectator readers are more receptive than most. Anyway, in my case it’s somewhat of an understatement: I worship the goddess Nicotiana. Or, as J. M. Barrie put it: “My Lady Nicotine.” Compton Mackenzie had it, simply, as “Sublime Tobacco.” And for any vegetarians among you, there’s always Frank Zappa’s “my favorite vegetable." I enjoy many forms of tobacco consumption, but having recently read Thomas Sydenham’s description of a tobacco smoke enema, I am convinced that not all methods are created equal. Cigars? Enjoyable, but exorbitantly expensive. Cigarettes?

September 28, 2026

Gavin Mortimer

Rural France is fighting a boar war

The hunting season began in Burgundy last Sunday. The first couple of weeks are dedicated to the pursuit of small game: pigeons, partridges and hares. Call it the hors d'oeuvre to the main course: the hunting of wild boar, which gets underway in earnest at the start of October. My neighbor, a farmer, hunts, and so does his son and most of their friends. They spent much of Sunday blazing away in the adjacent fields. I felt like I was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not that I mind. I was a townie in another life but now I’m what the French call a plouc (yokel), and in rural France hunting is sacrosanct. It’s also imperative, specifically the culling of wild boar. Their numbers have exploded in recent years and the damage they do is immense.

September 22, 2026

Kristina Murkett

AI is turning the world into slop

It seems AI is not just making everyone sound the same, but now everything must look the same too. I haven’t been able to walk into a pub, cafe or shop this summer without noticing the uncanny, slightly unreal sheen of an AI-generated poster. From caricatured cartoon children on a nursery advertisement to an abnormally glistening burger on a food menu, every billboard, flyer and sign now seems to have been regurgitated from the same ChatGPT printing press. We are hurtling ever closer to a flattened future in which everything converges toward the average, the mediocre, the visual mean There are many telltale signs that a sign is generic AI-slop.

September 21, 2026

Josh Sims

Meet the adult toddlers who play with toys

A colleague of mine has a sizable collection of sportscars. He has, he notes, every expression of his favorite, the Lotus Esprit. He lovingly cleans them, occasionally changes up the way they’re displayed. What he might then jokingly add is just how easy this is. The biggest of his cars is just a few inches long. They’re models, of the kind that small children might push over the carpet making “brrm, brrm” noises, once they’ve passed out of what the toymakers call the “bash and crash” phase, when motorway carnage is the name of the game. What might appear strange to an older generation – overlooking their own love of train sets – is that this mid-life interest in toys is not unusual.

September 18, 2026

Beatrice Scudeler

We don’t need more Austen adaptations. Or do we?

It’s a shame that Jane Austen can’t profit from selling the adaptation rights to her novels. In her own lifetime, she made but a modest living as a writer. Today, she would be fabulously wealthy. As it is, the copyright has long expired, so it’s all fair game. In the last three decades alone, Austen’s stories have spawned over a dozen adaptations.

Rose George

The history and importance of smell for our antiseptic age

For smell historians and experts, of whom there are gratifyingly more than you’d think, a standard assumption to be skewered is that olden ages stank; the modern world doesn’t because hygiene and chemicals have banished stinks in the name of progress. According to this reading of history, banishing odors is a sign of progress. Civilization doesn’t smell. Neither Bjørn Berge nor William Tullett stand for this. For them, older times may have been smellier, but people were comfortable with living alongside middens, rotting corpses and foul tanneries. Smell in the modern age is now under threat and at risk of extinction or of being even more marginalized – Tullett uses the word “ephemeralized” – than it already is in this age of visual primacy and screens.

September 16, 2026

Alexander Larman

Brown furniture isn’t dead

Throw out your grandfather clocks, the naysayers said, and banish your commodes to the scrapheap and junkshop. Brown furniture – invented in the Georgian and Regency eras and popularized for the mass market in the Victorian period – has been decreed by those tastemakers in the know to be as dead as Jacob Marley – a man who undoubtedly would have cherished those heavy mahogany bed frames and cabinets that were synonymous with his age – and showing even fewer signs of returning, even in spectral form. The reasons for the apparent demise of brown furniture are less to do with a rejection of sturdy, well-built items that were once the pride and joy of any household and more because we are living smaller lives, in all senses.

Alys Denby

Americans can’t write funny novels

If I recommended you an American novel called Stoner, what would you think? You’d probably assume it was some hallucinogen-inspired rubbish from the 1960s by someone who once met Allen Ginsberg. You wouldn’t think it was a plangent, devastating story about the failed life of an English literature academic. That’s because, if a campus novel like this were British, it would have been written by Kingsley Amis, Howard Jacobson or Evelyn Waugh. It would never have had such a terrible title and would also be comic rather than achingly sad. That’s the difference between British and American novels: American novels aren’t funny.

September 11, 2026

Sophie Law

The Renoir heist was entirely predictable

Things are tough for French museums right now. A dawn raid on Tuesday at the Musée Renoir in Cagnes-sur-Mer resulted in the theft of two paintings by Renoir worth $10.5 million (another two were stolen but swiftly abandoned). On long term loan from the Musée d’Orsay, the paintings were seized when thieves sliced through the museum's garden fence with an electric saw. Following a spate of thefts from French museums in July, France’s patrimoine is undeniably under threat. The Louvre heist was inspirational While British museums (The Horniman, Pitt Rivers, Ashmolean, Fitzwilliam and occasionally British Museum) busy themselves with the return of their artifacts, the French, it would seem, struggle to keep hold of theirs.

Esther Walker

Coffee-drinking is a cult

Ten years ago, I started getting migraines. They were so bad that when one struck, I babbled nonsense, couldn’t speak, type or write. The swelling in my head, which caused the migraine, was pressing on the language department of my brain. Once recovered, I was confused for days, repeating words three or four times in a row and not quite understanding what was being said to me. This all had to stop immediately, as communication is key to the smooth operation of my life. It was suggested to me that coffee is a common migraine trigger and if I was looking for a culprit I ought to start right there. I immediately cut out the black stuff and the migraines stopped.

September 10, 2026

Margaret Mitchell

Welcome to the Silicon Valley cinematic universe

Yesterday, a teaser dropped for Artificial, a biopic directed by Luca Guadagnino based on Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI in 2023. Earlier this summer, a trailer was released for The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s Meta drama, which is a follow-up to his 2010 film about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, The Social Network. And in the past few days, audiences at the Venice and Telluride film festivals have been hyping up Nathan Fielder’s documentary You Can See Everything about the Theranos founder/fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, as well as Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary. (Gibney made an earlier documentary about Holmes, who has already been the subject of a biopic, played by Amanda Seyfried in The Dropout.

September 9, 2026

Daniel Seifert

We don’t swear like we used to

In the halcyon, innocent year of our lord 2004, there was a minor political scandal, if you can imagine such a thing. Then-Vice President Dick Cheney was questioned by a Democratic senator about his financial ties to a government contractor during a photo op. Cheney’s response was short but far from sweet: the inquisitive senator was told to go “fuck yourself.” A few years later, reminiscing happily about the moment during a radio interview, Cheney doubled down on his mot juste, saying “You’d be surprised by how many people liked that. That’s sort of the best thing I ever did.” A sad state of affairs indeed, and I’m not talking about the long decline of inter-party discourse. I mean the decline of swearing, in its quality, if not quantity.

September 4, 2026

Rosie Millard

How Charles de Gaulle won over Gen Z

It turns out that this summer’s cinematic hero is not Spiderman or even Odysseus, but the French wartime leader Charles de Gaulle who has knocked both Marvel and Homer into a kepi (the French military hat he favored). De Gaulle, a two-part, six-hour epic directed by Antonin Baudry has been a surprising hit in France and is in demand from all the major international markets, including those of Latin America, India and China. The buzz is remarkable for a foreign-language film starring a person who, although a national hero in his homeland, is not a global household name.