Christmas special | The Spectator

Payton’s place

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. Four episodes in, I finally decided I really didn’t like The Politician (Netflix). Initially, I thought I might because there was lots of advertising assuring me how good and culturally important it was going to be. Also, it’s made by the same creative team responsible for Glee, that slick but likable and quite moreish series about an American high school glee club where an impeccably diverse class of gay and disabled people keeps bursting into implausibly accomplished cover versions of classic pop songs. But no. The Politician leaves you with the same unpleasant, dirty, life-just-wasted feeling I imagine you’d get from watching Japanese hentai porn.

Matt Labash

The pod delusion

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At a recent party, a mortgage-banker friend approached, asking me to come on his podcast. I politely declined. ‘What do I know about mortgage banking?’ I protested. ‘I don’t know my ARM from my Fannie Mae.’ I’ve never made my amigo for the sensitive type. His hobbies include drinking tequila like he’s in a worm-eating contest and getting in fistfights at professional sporting events. But he seemed wounded. ‘My podcast isn’t just about mortgage banking,’ he said, ‘it’s about spirituality.’ Here, I was briefly tempted, as I’m more in touch with spirituality than loan originations.

Dominic Green

Leonardo da Virtual

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first time ever I saw her face, she was smiling. I knew her face before I saw it, but I cannot remember when I first knew it, because I had always seen it. But when I first saw her in the flesh, I couldn’t really see her at all. She was behind thick glass and a waist-high wall, and a crowd of people 20-deep were pushing toward her, shouting and pointing and taking photographs. She was still smiling, but as I forced my way out of the crowd, I felt as though the smile no longer expressed the mysterious inner mood of a high-born Florentine sitting in a loggia, but the bemused contempt of a woman sitting in the stocks for the entertainment of the mob.

alice wokeland children’s greta literature wokeness

Melanie McDonagh

We are all Greta now

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. For woke children everywhere, the exciting news is that along with the book on Gutsy Women that she has written with her mother, the indefatigable Chelsea Clinton had another book out this year. It’s called Don’t Let Them Disappear and it’s about animals in danger of extinction. A bit big for a child’s stocking, but could be one for under the tree. Last year, it was Start Now!, a guide for juvenile activists wanting to change the world, beginning at home. Before that, Chelsea C. published She Persisted Around the World, about 13 girls who ‘never took no for an answer’. And before that, in 2015, she produced her juvenile activist guide It’s Your World.

James Panero

The haunting of Russell Kirk

Russell Kirk’s novel Old House of Fear became a surprise bestseller when it was first published in 1961. First issued in hardcover by a small publishing house called Fleet, Old House quickly went through multiple paperback reprintings by Avon Books. Mary MacAskival, the red-haired love interest, has an increasingly tantalizing appearance on Avon’s succession of cheesecake covers. ‘Rich in atmosphere and intimations of impending doom… from the first muffled cry to the final midnight scream,’ declared the New Yorker of an edition on whose cover Mary sneaks around a Gothic portal in pink pajamas. ‘Wild excitement, sadistic violence.

The Spectator

The Spectator’s Books of the Year 2019

Andrew J. Bacevich I have reached the age when it seems important to give attention to the books I ought to have read long ago but skipped past. As an American born in the middle of the 20th century, I’m drawn to the literature of that era. Lately, I have been reading for the first time John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (Penguin, $18), published during the Great Depression. Of course, I have seen John Ford’s gripping interpretation of the novel, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. It’s a great movie. In my estimation, the novel itself is also a masterpiece. Of course, it is necessarily a product of its time, saturated with a sentimental depiction of those dispossessed by massive economic upheaval.

Emily Ferguson

The call of the wild

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. People who go into the wild looking to meet bloodthirsty predators are either a living Xanax pill or some sort of dominatrix version of Jane Goodall. Especially when it’s winter. Save yourself a mauling by a hungry puma, swap your earmuffs for earphones and get wild with The Wild, in which ecologist and award-winning filmmaker Chris Morgan leaps sure-footedly from one wildlife topic to another like a mountain goat. Like Nature itself, The Wild is pretty random but always red in tooth and claw. Morgan focuses on the overlap between animals and humans: something people tend not to consider when they move into areas where the neighbors are bears or cougars.

Ben Sixsmith

Star Wars: the force a-weakens

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. The first Star Wars trilogy enraptured by blending classic drama with science fiction. There was Luke Skywalker the fresh-faced hero, emerging from obscurity to save the day. There was Vader the villain, who had once been good but had embraced the dark side. There was the Emperor, the twisted puppeteer. There was the daredevil pilot Han Solo. There was Leia, the princess who had to be saved. There was even that essential companion on any voyage: a bumbling upper-class Englishman. All of it was familiar from classic cinema and adventure stories, but all of it had the strangeness of science fiction. The villain lurked behind a fearsome mask and choked people by mind control.

Susan Hill

The boy on the hillside

The boy, Seth, stirred in his sleep. ‘Cold…’ He had pushed the blanket off, with his tossing and turning about. ‘Here, here.’ The man seated on the ground nearest to him rearranged Seth’s covering, pulling it up and tucking it under him until he was swaddled like a baby. His head rested on an old fleece. https://audioboom.com/posts/1816403-susan-hill-reads-the-boy-on-the-hillside There were five men and the boy out on this first night of bitter weather. Until now it had been wild winds and huge clouds gray as boulders rolling across the sky and the sheep huddled wherever they could shelter from the gale, but later that day the clouds had shredded into skeins, becoming thinner and paler until they vanished and the sky was quite clear.

Luke Haines

Christmas crackers: the tragic soul of Natalie Cole

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. As any Yule fool knows, there’s no Christmas album like an old Christmas album. But there’s not many of them. We’ve had plenty of classic Christmas singles but hardly any classic Christmas albums. In fact, since little Phil Spector went and ‘canceled’ himself and the life of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003, there is only one. Nowadays, a double-sided helping of Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You from 1963 would have the most ardent Wall Of Sound fan hearing sirens, not sleigh bells.

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