Features

Wednesday

Sarah Perry

Slipshod: a short story by Sarah Perry

It was months before the difficulty with Marnie and Addison was talked about, or even alluded to. The sight of their names in emails circulated around the department was enough to cause a pall to settle on everything, like ash from fires only just put out. Besides, the nature of the difficulty (that was the word we all used) was both so opaque and so distressing we’d have had trouble talking about it, even if we’d wanted to. It fell to me to piece things together. My brief from Helen was simply to satisfy the university that nobody in the department was to blame. It fell to me because I am, she tells me, part of the furniture: unremarkable, functional, predictable.

slipshod
David Mamet

The myth of human sacrifice

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 fury is not caused by "the other" but by their own mind.

david mamet
Damian Thompson

The Sherlockians’ game

There is no better time to read a Sherlock Holmes story than a winter evening. As the rain lashes against the windows and the fog descends, we can imagine ourselves sitting companionably with the great detective and the good doctor around the Baker Street hearth, waiting for the step of a visitor upon the stair. Unfortunately, our 21st-century climate rarely cooperates. The rainstorm arrives when we’re far from a hearth, fighting with an umbrella that turns inside-out at the first breath of wind. And when were you last enveloped in a London fog? The savagery of the elements beating down on 221b seems to belong to another world. "It was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November… Outside the wind howled down Baker Street" ("The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez").

Gyles Brandreth

How Queen Camilla is spreading the joy of reading

Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. "There’s something so tactile about a book," she says. "I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…" The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as she can remember. She says her father, Bruce Shand, inspired this lifelong passion: "He read to us as children. He chose the books, and we listened. He was probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books." Bruce Shand was a soldier. His father was a writer, about architecture, food and wine. His father was another writer, who, incidentally, was briefly and secretly engaged to Constance Lloyd, who went on to marry Oscar Wilde. This is a family with literary leanings.

William Moore

Jung Chang: what the West gets wrong about China

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 nonfiction 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 worse, than Hitler or Stalin.

Tuesday

William Atkinson, Lara Brown and John Power

Peter Thiel predicts the future

Peter Thiel has been described variously as “America’s leading public intellectual,” the “architect of Silicon Valley’s contemporary ethos” or as an “incoherent and alarmingly super-nationalistic” malevolent force. The PayPal and Palantir founder, a prominent early supporter of Donald Trump, is one of the world’s richest and most influential men. Throughout his career, his principal concern has always been the future, so when The Spectator asked to interview him, he wanted to talk to young people. To that effect, three young members of the editorial team were sent to Los Angeles to meet him. What follows is an edited transcript of their conversation.