Features

Thursday

William Boyd

The lure of the spy novel

Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film as a director, The Trench. I always think about the film on 11 November, because during the shoot we observed a uniquely different minute’s silence in the labyrinth of trenches we had constructed on a soundstage at Bray Studios in Berkshire. The film follows a squad of young soldiers as they wait, over two fraught days in 1916, for the Battle of the Somme to begin. We paused filming at 11 a.m. and fell silent. I was standing in the frontline trench with a dozen young actors who were all in their totally authentic first world war uniforms, Lee-Enfield rifles in their hands. Time travel.

A.N. Wilson

The end of Christendom is nigh

If you are of a traditional turn of mind, you might well go to church this Christmas, sing the carols you knew in childhood and feel a bit of a Dickensian glow. If you are already Christian, the experience will confirm your sense that what is commemorated is the most stupendous thing in human history – the arrival of Jesus Christ, whether or not you believe the stories as told in the readings. Statistically, however, it is highly unlikely that you will be going back to church for months – probably not until next year. If you did venture into your local church on a normal Sunday, you would find a tiny band of old people like me who go regularly and who are wondering, all the time, how much longer it can all continue.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

A Christian revival is under way

This is my second Christmas as a Christian. As an atheist, I had dismissed the bright lights and customs of Christmas as traditions that had evolved to keep our spirits up as the cold of winter creeps in. But the more I learn about, and participate in, the rituals of my adopted faith, the less Grinch-like I become. Christmas isn’t just crass commercialism, it’s vital to a western revival. Celebrating it is more important than ever. The date of 25 December was significant before the birth of Christ of course. It coincided with the Ancient Roman celebration of Winter Solstice, just as 25 March was the Spring Equinox.

Lawrence Osborne

Demonia: a short story

They passed into the harbour of Favignana at the beginning of spring, the island’s single small mountain heaving into view from the Trapani ferry, burned brown by centuries of parch and abandonment. A disused Bourbon castle sprawled upon its summit, while below it near the water stood an old tuna-processing factory with 19th-century industrial chimneys. The raffish little port lay alongside. They came down on to a deserted quay with the harbour on their right filled with the pale blue and copper boats of the bluefin fishermen listing in shallows. The fishermen seemed to have walked off into a different life, perhaps never to return.

Mary Beard

Elon Musk is wrong about the Roman Empire

I was in Washington D.C. during The Election, living halfway between the Capitol and White House. Concerned friends suggested I move to some boutique hotel in Virginia for election week, in case of ‘trouble’ in Washington. Or at least, they said, I should stock up the freezer, as I might not be able to get safely to the shops for several days if the results were bitterly contested. I took the freezer option (plus an enhanced cellar) and planned a week of working from home, to follow the news from each swing state, fortified by my supplies. It was all for nothing. By the time I woke up on the morning after the election, everything was settled: Mr Trump had incontestably won. So I gave up the working-from-home option and walked to my office on the Mall.

Helena Rees-Mogg

I hope nobody watches Meet the Rees-Moggs

Towards the end of last year, the production company Optomen TV contacted Jacob about the possibility of filming a documentary series on what life was like as an MP. The idea was to start shooting in June, since it was assumed the show would build to the natural finale of an autumn general election and its aftermath. A pilot day was filmed in Somerset in March, when the children were home from school and we hosted our annual meet for the Mendip Farmers Hunt. The producers decided the show could work. Then Rishi Sunak fired the starting gun for the election on 22 May, before we’d signed anything. Jacob took the plunge and agreed to start filming that afternoon. The crew were already waiting when I returned from school with the children.

Andrew Watts

What I learned at Santa School

Whenever my son’s primary school ring up, they have, very sensibly, a calming form of words: ‘It’s the school here but don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong.’ It became clear, however, that Mrs Gribben had not thought through the rest of the conversation: ‘Our Father Christmas has dropped out, and we thought of you because, well…’ ‘You can’t do role playwith real children. Weuse elves, generally’ A few weeks later, I join a Santa refresher course organised by Ministry of Fun, a company which supplies Father Christmases (or Fathers Christmas?) to department stores such as Selfridges and Hamleys.

Andrew Lambirth

The otherworldly artist who made his name at The Spectator

There is something otherworldly about Rory McEwen’s paintings of plants, leaves and fruit. They are indisputably beautiful, often breathtakingly so, but they are almost eerie in their self-possession. They are like planets vibrating to the music of the spheres – quivering with arrested energy. These images are super-real (rather than surreal) but they sometimes have a surreal edge that can be disturbing. ‘I paint flowers as a way of getting as close as possible to what I perceive as the truth’ Although best known for painting these botanical watercolours on vellum, Mc-Ewen (1932–82) was a man of many parts: an extraordinarily talented figure, a poet and broadcaster, a folk and blues musician as well as, for many, the greatest botanical painter of the past hundred years.

Marcus Walker

What The Spectator taught Benjamin Franklin

Christmas came early this year. No, I’m not moaning about the carols that my local café started piping at the beginning of September (although that’s enough to enrage any priest). This year my first proper Christmas moment occurred two weeks early when a lovely couple chose to have not one but two Christmas carols for their wedding. We hadn’t even hit December before I found myself in the curmudgeonly position of muttering ‘Except Easter’ as a full church belted out the line ‘This holy tide of Christmas all other doth efface’. It was all very jolly, even if I felt momentarily Scroogelike. Not that this was the most amusing of the winter weddings that we’ve held at my church, St Bartholomew the Great in West Smithfield.

Maureen Lipman

Notes from a national treasure

I’ve started rehearsals for the pantomime Beauty and the Beast at Richmond Theatre: two shows a day and just 13 days to learn everything, with songs, tongue-tying shticks, ghouls, hairy beasts and all. It’s like weekly rep with falsies and fart jokes. At the first rehearsal I confess I felt a little out of place in the cast of ridiculously bright-eyed young things with shiny cheeks and Lycra shorts. The director asked us all to introduce ourselves in one sentence. ‘I’m Maureen Lipman,’ I muttered, ‘and I’m a fucking National Treasure.’ The baked potato I eat in a café near the old Battersea Town Hall, now a slightly bedraggled, palazzo-style arts centre, may have been put in the oven in 1946, when I was. It’s an unhealthy shade of taupe.

Michael Farr

The prescient politics of Tintin

Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school was on a Brussels newspaper, Le Vingtième Siècle, but boringly in the subscriptions department. His mind was set on becoming a top foreign correspondent like some of the leading names of the 1920s. Having failed to join the ranks of renowned reporters, Hergé had created one in Tintin He really had started on the bottom rung, for subscriptions were located in the basement of the newspaper building. At every opportunity he would migrate upstairs, to the busy newsroom and especially to the cuttings library, where he discovered the world at his fingertips.

Craig Brown

Don’t tell me to ‘unwind’!

The most irritating word of the year was ‘unwind’. ‘Unwind with one of our artisan cocktails in the curated ambience of…’ and so on. For most of us, the call to ‘unwind’ promotes the very stress it purports to alleviate. Radio 3 is currently the station most fretful about unwinding, beseeching us to ‘ease into your day with welcoming harmonies’ and ‘focus for the morning with stress-busting music’. Its new ‘24/7 stream’ is called ‘Classical Unwind’. Is this a wind-up? If you’re still feeling anxious by the evening, Classic FM offers ‘Calm Classics’ at 10 p.m.: ‘The perfect soothing soundtrack to help you wind down at the end of the day.

The Spectator

A Spectator Christmas poll: Who is the most overrated painter?

Jonathan Meades       This is a crowded field. A few years ago, I was delighted when Tracey Emin walked out of an address I was giving at the Royal Academy. But she’s no painter. The crown, then, has to go to Lucian Freud who was, unquestionably, a painter but a really bad one. Early on in his career were a few works which owed their being to the neue sachlichkeit (although he denied it). Soon however the primacy of ‘the mark’ asserted itself – splodgy, messy, coarse, smeared, oafish, impasted and increasingly auto-plagiaristic. It’s all very well attempting to reduce your models and daughters (often the same) to bulky chunks from an abattoir, but it would help were the self-promoting genius to study butchery first.

Ed West

The surprising truth about old myths

I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the ancient hillfort of a millennia earlier truly feels as though it belongs to the world of gods and heroes, of Homer and the Trojan War. If my imagination hadn’t been destroyed by decades of television, I could almost imagine myself there. One of the curiosities of findings in archaeology and DNA is that many of the old myths appear to be true Walking past ancient burial mounds and gazing at Argos in the near distance, I liked to think that I was in the footsteps of a real Agamemnon – and perhaps I was, and there really was a king of that name who led a war across the sea.

Tanya Gold

A world without Jewish artists

It’s Christmas, and the far left have a gift for us in their stocking: a cultural boycott of Jews. They don’t call it that, of course. Rather, they say it is a boycott of Israel, and that those who support Israel, and people who confuse Israelis with Jews – that  is, most people – are anti-Semites. That peace-seeking, leftist Israelis and Jews (good Israelis and Jews) will be those boycotted (I can’t see Itamar Ben-Gvir turning to romance fiction) doesn’t seem to bother them any more than murdering good Israelis and Jews mattered to Hamas on 7 October 2023. It was, rather, the point of it all. Hollywood Jews often hid their Jewishness. Sam Spiegel had a phase of calling himself S.P.

Katy Balls and Michael Gove

‘I will die protecting this country’: Kemi Badenoch on where she plans to take the Tories

‘It’s like a start-up,’ Kemi Badenoch explains of her new job, as she plumps down on a sofa in the Spectator offices. A month into her tenure as Conservative party leader and she is discovering the upsides to being out of power. ‘Everyone around me in the leader of the opposition office is there because of me – not because they happened to be there when I got there. That changes the dynamic quite a bit.’ ‘What’s a lunch break? Lunch is for wimps. I don’t think sandwiches are a real food’ She says the ‘biggest difference’ so far between being a secretary of state and leader of the opposition is that the role is ‘actually a lot less lonely’.

Kate Andrews

‘The public sector is the illness’: Javier Milei on his first year in office

Buenos Aires ‘I never wind down,’ says Argentina’s President Javier Milei when we meet in his Presidential Office at the Casa Rosada. ‘I work all day, practically… I get up at 6 a.m., I take a shower and at 7 a.m. I am already at my desk working. And I work all the way until 11 p.m. I enjoy my job. I enjoy cutting public spending. I love the chainsaw.’ It was a photo of Milei with a chainsaw – who was then the insurgent candidate – that propelled him to international fame last year. He waved it on the campaign trail as a symbol of what he would do to government regulations and bureaucracy if elected to the presidency. He had previously gone viral in a video showing him shouting ‘Afuera!’ (‘Out!’) while ripping names of government departments off a whiteboard.

Stephen Fry

How Rory Stewart led me astray

I have just returned from a tour of Australia and New Zealand, on whose citizens I inflicted An Evening With Stephen Fry. I first ‘played’ Australia in 1981. The Cambridge Footlights Revue that Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Tony Slattery, Paul Shearer, Penny Dwyer and I had put on in Edinburgh attracted the attention of an Australian impresario called Michael Edgley. Would we be interested in taking our show around his country? Tony had another year of university to go and in the end Hugh and Emma joined up with the previous year’s Footlighters, Robert Bathurst and Martin Bergman. That summer Ian Botham had sensationally and all but single-handedly wrested the Ashes urn from the Australians’ grasp, so we called our show – something of a red rag to a bull – Botham, the Musical.

Thursday

Alexandra Shulman

Chanel should be led by a woman

Since I’m considering giving a small Christmas drinks party, I’ve been reading all the festive entertainment features. There are recipes for canapés (does anyone actually make their own complicated snacks?), floral arrangements, garden illuminations and individual cocktails. These suggestions are exhausting enough to put one right off the whole idea. All the experts interviewed on their entertaining skills share an insouciance about hosting which unfortunately bears no resemblance to how I feel in the run-up. They don’t appear to fret about numbers, are able to whip up simple delicious food for a cast of thousands and always hear the doorbell ring. They never seem to stress about whether it’s necessary to have a coat rail and whether it is all too much of a crush.

Owen Matthews

The deepening unpopularity of Zelensky

Perhaps all political careers must end, inevitably, in failure. But few politicians have had careers as meteoric, as surprising, as consequential or as heroic as that of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. In just five years he has gone from TV comedian to victor of the biggest presidential landslide in his country’s history to inspiring wartime leader who impressed the world with his resolve and personal bravery. But now with the war entering its third (and probably last) winter, Zelensky’s extraordinary story as Ukraine’s leader has reached its final chapter.