Life

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. New York ‘What are you working on?’ is a standard and annoying question often asked of creative types. Finally, I have a good answer: ‘Nothing.’ That was my response at a recent New York dinner party at the home of the Italian journalist Mario Platero and his British wife, Ariadne. The Plateros have been entertaining the New York media class for decades and many of their long-time guests are even older than I am. But they are all still announcing projects. More power to them. They are fighting obsolescence. I’m embracing it. For one thing, it is hard not to be fatalistic if you are a journalist.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. When I was growing up, one of my closest female friends was Muslim. At first, her parents didn’t want us to be friends; they figured that as a child of divorced parents, I’d be a bad influence. Their restrictions pushed her to what they would surely have thought of as the dark side, had they ever known what we got up to. She and I were devout feminists, and we knew that women’s equality was more important than the dictates of religion. Neither she nor her mother covered her hair with a hijab or wore a baggy abaya. I’d been raised in a Christian household where short skirts were prohibited, but I’d recently moved in with my more permissive mother and stepfather.

This article is in The Spectator’s November 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. At the very southern tip of Brooklyn, far from the hip avocado cafés and right before you hit the sea, there sits the neighborhood of Brighton Beach. Nicknamed ‘Little Odessa’ after the waterfront city in Ukraine, the area is home to primarily Russian-speaking immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It’s a jumble of identity. The immigrants are mostly Jews from Ukraine, hence the nickname, but also Russia, Belarus and the other Soviet republics. So what to call these people in America? In Russia, in Ukraine, in Belarus, our identity cards never described us as Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian. We were just Evrei, Jews.

This article is in The Spectator’s October 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. New York This feels strange. Since 1977, I have been writing the High Life column in the London Spectator and concentrating on American goings-on for a British audience. Now I am about to write the High Life for an American readership. Are American readers very different? You betcha, though they are supposed to speak the King’s, or the Queen’s, English. Never mind. Both countries take their democracies seriously, and their freedoms even more so. One difference is that, over in the Old Country, people know that democracy is rare in distant parts of the world.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. Cole Porter sang: ‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking / Was looked on as something shocking / But now, God knows, / Anything goes.’ Everything went, and with it: humor. World War One was followed by a licentious riot of amoral libertinism, with the collapse of religious convictions, ethical norms, societal conventions and plain good manners. Nothing was sacrosanct and this turned laughter into hard work. Like going to see Waiting for Godot and waiting for the punch lines. Or skating over the thin ice on the river of despair in the novels of Evelyn Waugh.

‘The Spectator is the best written paper,’ the American Whig Review said in 1851. ‘It has a place for every thing, and every thing can be found in its place.’ Not much has changed. The Spectator is still the greatest magazine in the English language. We will soon become the first magazine in history to publish a 10,000th edition. As that milestone approaches, we are expanding: this first American issue marks the beginning of an exciting New World chapter. It’s odd, perhaps, that it has taken us 191 years to come to America. The Spectator, rooted in true liberal and radical thinking, has long had an affinity for the Land of the Free. Our history is full of American connections.