Sam Leith has been taking lessons in taxidermy, and he hasn’t had so much fun in ages ‘Now I’m going to show you what a scalpel handle is for,’ says Mike Gadd. I pick up the one nearest me, and start trying to affix the blade that I’ve so far been using pinched between finger
There is a new kind of class distinction in the dining car from King’s Cross to York. Most of us — hoi polloi, relatively speaking — observe the convention that once the fishcake starters are served, it is polite to talk to the strangers with whom we happen to be sharing a table; and there
Apart from the weather, the food and the landscape, one of the great joys of visiting France is to witness the behaviour of the children there, which is in such contrast to the noisy, aggressive, defiant, whingeing, tiresome selfishness of all too many British youngsters. Even when surrounded by families in a French restaurant, you
Many years ago, Chris Gent tried to explain to me how computers worked. I was a trainee banker; he was a systems manager in the same firm; his explanation had something to do with ferrite rods and magnetic poles. It was a very fluent explanation, but I never quite got the hang of it. That
Dublin Is Sinn Fein/IRA becoming the Hezbollah of Ireland — a state within a state? Just a matter of weeks ago, such a thought would have been dismissed by mainstream opinion here as a product of the fevered imagination of Conor Cruise O’Brien, the South’s most celebrated anti-republican. After all, Gerry Adams was the most
It is 7 a.m. and across Britain sober citizens awake to switch on the BBC Radio Four news. They expect perhaps to hear about Iraqis killing Iraqis, about some hope in Palestine or Gordon Brown’s latest boasts on the economy. Instead, at the top of the bulletin they learn what the BBC judges the most
As soon as I see Bertha’s rear end backing down the tailgate towards me, I think there has been some mistake. They told me they would find a nice quiet mare, given that I have never been riding before. Advancing upon me are the towering bay buttocks of the biggest horse I have ever seen.
Mark Steyn says it’s time for limp, languid Tory toffs to join the fight for freedom New Hampshire On the eve of the Iraq election, the Times treated us to a riveting columnar collaboration: ‘We need to fix an exit timetable, say Robin Cook, Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell’ — in perfect harmony. To modify
James Bartholomew says American healthcare is an expensive muddle that leaves millions unprotected, and yet it delivers much better results — for everyone — than the NHS Which is better — American or British medical care? If a defender of the National Health Service wants to win the argument against a free market alternative, he
Tikrit Sitting beneath a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt pinned to the wall of his office deep inside a former Baathist presidential palace, Lieutenant Colonel Jim Stockmoe lolled back in his chair and roared with laughter at the fatal idiocy of so many of his enemies. ‘We’ve had well over a dozen examples of these knuckleheads doing
Baghdad The election-night special on Iraqi TV, rather like the election itself, bore little resemblance to anything that British viewers might be familiar with. There were few candidates to interview (too scared), no counts to visit (too slow), and a merciful lack of macho electoral clichés. In Iraq, the terms ‘battleground seat,’ ‘war room’ and
Sir Denis Mahon arrived at The Spectator 40 minutes before he was due to be interviewed. While I scuffed around in search of tape recorders and sensible questions, Britain’s most distinguished collector and historian of Italian art sat in the editor’s office, waiting. Every now and then I looked at him through the door jamb.
Multiculturalism is in crisis. By that I don’t just mean that political correctness has ‘gone mad’, as the Daily Mail likes to put it: the British public worked that out long ago, and merely shrugs when it learns (for example) that the Lake District National Park is to abolish its guided walks because they attract
Charles Glass discovers that women are now cancelling dinner dates by text. What’s the world coming to? For the sixth time in as many months, a woman has cancelled our dinner. In and of itself, a cancelled dinner is a trifle. The cancellations themselves were less surprising than the timing and the method. Did the
Last week the United Nations still had no staff at Banda Aceh airport, which is the focal point for the tsunami relief effort in Indonesia. What could more graphically illustrate the miserable inadequacy of this once great body than its failure to act decisively following the Boxing Day disaster? It lagged behind the Americans and
‘What happened to him?’ I said, meeting the eye of a thin magpie through the bars of his cage. Andrew Meads, veteran bird rescuer and proprietor of Safewings wildlife sanctuary at Isham, near Kettering, Northants, related the following case history. A fortnight ago a man driving a stolen car suddenly lost control, mounted the pavement,
Ross Clark says that the existing law allows us to defend ourselves robustly against burglars. We don’t need a licence to murder them This week sees an event about as common as a total eclipse of the moon: an alignment of views between the House of Commons tearoom and the taproom down at the Dog
Robert Gore-Langton on R.C. Sherriff, the deeply untrendy author of Journey’s End, whose run finishes next month One of the more bizarre sights of last year must have been at a matinee in the West End. A major in the Royal Green Jackets turned up to see the hit production of Journey’s End, the first
Simon Heffer deplores the fashion for dressing down. It’s ugly and disrespectful and leaves men looking like idiots We all know that life under the Blair Terror can be pretty grim, but I am beginning to fret about the increasing signs of a collapse in national morale. I do not refer to the well-documented exodus
Douglas Davis reveals new evidence that Tehran intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel, and argues that the mullahs’ nuclear facilities must be destroyed The Middle East is on the brink of going nuclear, and the rest of the world is fiddling or looking the other way. The United States is draining its energies in