10000th UK issue of The Spectator

How to buy The Spectator’s 10,000th UK edition in the US

The Spectator in London has this week done something no other magazine has done. We’ve just published our 10,000th edition. We’ve been producing a weekly magazine since 1828 — I’m proud to have been involved in the magazine for 10 of those 192 years. The key to our longevity is that The Spectator is unique; it dares to be different. We have pretty much stuck to the same simple editorial formula — news and comment first, book reviews after — because it works. We allow jokes and dissent. We encourage arguments. As Douglas Murray puts it in his column this week, The Spectator’s enemies are ‘Boredom. Predictability. Obviousness. Humorlessness. Dullness. Staleness.

mr spectator 10,000th
salman rushdie

The wisdom of Salman

‘Things that would have seemed utterly improbable now happen on a daily basis,’ Sir Salman Rushdie tells me. ‘The implausible has now become everyday.’ Isn’t this a problem for a writer whose books derive from the fantastical traditions of magic realism and science fiction, where crazy stuff happening is what sets them apart? ‘It is.’ The active threat to Rushdie’s life from radical Islam is two decades behind him. His novels have a way of dealing in sour, sometimes apocalyptic ironies. His latest, the Booker-shortlisted Quichotte, is set in what it describes as ‘the Age of Anything-Can-Happen’.