paywall Archives

Wednesday

February 26, 2020

Urbino legend

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. At the time of his death on Good Friday, 1520, Raffaello Sanzio of Urbino was the most successful artist the world had ever seen. In terms of sheer skill, expert judges like the historian Paolo Giovio rated him third among the supreme trinity of Renaissance artists — after the stiffest imaginable competition, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. But in terms of worldly success, Raphael died as the unchallenged prince of artists. He was the favorite artist of the greatest patron in Christendom, the Medici pope Leo X. He had been commissioned to decorate the most prestigious monuments in Rome.

Tuesday

February 25, 2020

D.J. Taylor

Finding the Lost Girls

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Encapsulations of a particular art-world demographic nearly always fall wide of the mark. Just as there were plenty of people on hand in the 1950s to protest that the Angry Young Men were neither especially angry nor exclusively male, so countless chroniclers of interwar social life complained that the Bright Young People were neither bright nor young. But the critic Peter Quennell’s phrase ‘Lost Girls’ to describe the gang of female twenty-somethings who worked on the magazines and populated the parties of Blitz-era literary London carries an unmistakable tang of conviction.

Digby Dent

The evolution of Vermont

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Putney, Vermont Ahoy, polloi. While I am a fan of the Reformation, I take a circumspect view of change. This old salt has a soft spot for tradition, yes, but he was taught from an early age that the vagaries of life are best met by suppressing doubt and feeling with industriousness and booze. Mostly booze. Mine not to reason why. Nevertheless, I persisted. Things change, of course. For instance, I’ve taken up residence in Vermont for a few weeks with a gal pal I dated between wife number two and wife number three (who is also wife number one, but that’s a story for another time).

Alex Colville

In coronavirus quarantine

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I’ve been quarantined, like millions of others in China. It was bound to happen sooner or later. I traveled all the way from Beijing to the third-tier city of Jining in Shandong province, where anyone arriving from another region must be detained for 14 days. There’s no kind way to deliver the news, so a Chinese colleague broke it to me over WeChat in a gentle but firm tone. It felt like being fired or dumped. It could be worse. I’m free to leave my building, but not the walled housing compound surrounding it.

Matt Purple

Global warning: 2020 Dems are floundering on foreign policy

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What would a Michael Bloomberg foreign policy look like? A total smoking ban across the Middle East seems imminent, even if it does risk spawning a new generation of pro-hookah jihadists. Fresh sanctions would likely be imposed on enemies of the West, including Iran and salt. Air superiority would be prioritized, especially as it pertains to illegally landing one’s personal helicopter in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Bloomberg has spent most of his career codifying class snobbery through petty regulations, and, while that’s a potent recipe for being annoying at home, it doesn’t really lend itself to a coherent agenda abroad.

Monday

February 24, 2020

Marlo Safi

The fast and the furious

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If the Roman Catholic Lent can be exemplified by fish fries, the Byzantine Catholic Lent can be encapsulated by Patrick Bateman’s final monologue in the movie American Psycho: ‘My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others.’ I am not a misanthrope. But a mere several days into the Byzantine Great Fast preceding Easter, going to social events can be torturous. The sight of meaty or cheesy foods causes me to want to pull the pin from my corporal grenade of self-control.

Josh Glancy

Let’s eat: Israeli cuisine is coming of age

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Being a Zionist is a complex business, not least because, like supermarket hummus, there are so many varieties. There are settlement-hungry messianists and utopian socialists, hard-right annexationists and soppy liberals who still dream of exchanging land for peace. It’s an identity that can confuse even its devotees. I’ve tended to belong in the last camp, but in recent years I’ve drifted from political Zionism altogether. It’s so draining, so deadlocked, so knotty and angst-ridden. I made a decision a few years ago to dial back my engagement with Israel, and life was a little lighter as a result. But it left an absence.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The prophetic Raymond Chandler

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here.Laramie, Wyoming In an age of extreme individualism complicated by racial sensitivity and class resentment, ancestry is an uncomfortable subject. But it remains a fact that a man’s ancestors are never irrelevant to who and what he is, though of course they determine neither. Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) said that he was conceived here in Laramie, before being delivered in Chicago following the usual interval of nine months. His American father deserted the family and his Anglo-Irish mother took her son to England, to be educated at Dulwich College.

Toby Young

Ganging up on Israel

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. At the end of January, the owner of Hull Kingston Rovers — an English rugby club that plays in the multinational Super League — wrote to the Catalans Dragons, a French club in the same competition. He explained that he would sue for damages if Hull experienced any financial loss as a result of the Dragons’ decision to sign the Australian player Israel Folau: ‘For example, if a title sponsor withdraws, or external investment is not secured, or quantifiable reputational damage is caused to the brand of Super League and its members.’ According to one source, ‘nearly all’ the Super League clubs felt the same way.

Paul Wood

Andy Khawaja: ‘the whistleblower’

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office. The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel.

Sunday

February 23, 2020

Dominic Green

Bernie Sanders is The Corbynizer

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Historians of the future, if there are any, will note that though the demieducated youth of the United States shed their belief in God, they still believed in Father Christmas. Uncertain of their futures, and in no hurry to pay off their student loans, the young entrusted their faith and debt jubilee to the Santa Claus of socialism, a little man with fluffy white hair proffering gifts from a big sack of other people’s money. In Victorian England, this traditional figure was known as Jeremy Corbyn, a vegetarian who gave every worker a lump of nationalized coal and scourged the Jews because they would not recognize him as their savior.

Saturday

February 22, 2020

Jacob Heilbrunn

Cyrus the Great

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Washington, DC has a proud jazz history: the birthplace of Duke Ellington where he made his first arrangements as a highs-chooler; the home of U Street, where joints like the Crystal Caverns and the Howard Theatre hosted Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and Count Basie. Today, jazz holds out in a few spots on U Street and in select clubs such as Blues Alley. A relative latecomer, founded in 1965 near M Street in the heart of hoity-toity Georgetown, Blues Alley touts itself as ‘the nation’s premier jazz and supper club’. Despite a menu featuring such delicacies as ‘McCoy Tyner’s Blackened Catfish’, the supper part can safely be labeled as hearty, but no more.

Friday

February 21, 2020

James Delingpole

The Democrats are fracking insane

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What could be more emblematic of the American Dream than fracking, the miracle technology that has created thousands of real jobs, lowered the cost of living, generated wealth and prosperity, boosted competitiveness and helped make the United States not just energy independent, but a net exporter of natural gas and petroleum products for the first time in decades? And what could be more characteristic of the elitist, small-minded, anti-market, anti-blue-collar, anti-growth, green-obsessed liberal-left than that the Democratic party is hell-bent on banning it?

Will Lloyd

Wells farrago: gaslighting the Invisible Man

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘To many young people nowadays,’ H.G. Wells sighed in 1934, ‘I am just the author of The Invisible Man.’ He meant the movie, not the novel. George Bernard Shaw might have said something similar, only at greater length, had he lived to see the improvements by which Alan Jay Lerner turned Pygmalion into My Fair Lady. But would Wells recognize the latest variation on his 123-year-old character at all? This Invisible Man is not much interested in invisibility or men, or men who happen to become invisible. Elisabeth Moss is Cecilia Kass, a harassed woman trapped in an abusive relationship with a sociopathic tech bro.

James Delingpole

Cats: The Snuff Movie

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. In the 1970s, the English humorist Alan Coren set out to create the grabbiest literary cover package in the history of bestsellerdom. He titled his book, a collection of funny essays, Golfing for Cats and hit the trifecta by putting a massive, and otherwise totally irrelevant, swastika on the front. Needless to say, the book sold well. Golf isn’t as big now as it was then, but Coren’s other two ingredients remain staples of popular entertainment.

Kapil Komireddi

Birth of a nation

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The 20th century was a crowded century. Event piled upon world-historical event to produce a mass of history so heavy with the prospect of annihilation and so alive with the possibilities of individual emancipation that one of humanity’s most extraordinary accomplishments, the constitution of a liberal democratic republic on the Indian subcontinent, went largely unnoticed in the West. The significance of India’s birth was, however, not lost on a colonial world clamoring for freedom, or African Americans striving to unlock the full promise of America. India’s founding on August 15, 1947, W.E.B. DuBois rhapsodized, would be ‘remembered as the greatest historical date of the 19th and 20th centuries’.

Wednesday

February 19, 2020

Andrew Cockburn

Democrat blues: the leadership fears and loathes the grassroots

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. ‘Today, I’m reflecting on the three years we’ve spent preparing for this moment, the changes we’ve made to make sure we are ready.’ That was Tom Perez, chair of the Democratic National Committee, on February 3, as Iowa Democrats prepared to state their choices in their state’s now infamous caucuses. Proclaiming that the Democratic party is ‘at its strongest when we empower the grassroots’, he expressed pride in ‘the historic reforms we passed to increase transparency and accessibility, and that the power is where it belongs: with our voters’.

Tuesday

February 18, 2020

Kapil Komireddi

Palermo without borders

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. On a wet November evening, Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, sat in the front pew of a church on the city’s main thoroughfare. He, like the citizens proliferating behind him, was waiting for the concert to begin. The setting and the seating order had a provincial air, like something out of an Upamanyu Chatterjee novel. But Orlando, the man who squeezed the Sicilian mafia, has a cosmopolitan vision. Orlando has converted Palermo, a major gateway for the masses pouring out of Africa and the Middle East, into perhaps Europe’s least administratively hostile city to prospective settlers.

Monday

February 17, 2020

Freddy Gray

A Trumpian feast

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Donald Trump serves the best food in Washington. The residents of DC won’t say so, but it’s true. America’s capital has a lively food scene, with many excellent restaurants. None is better than the two that are in the soon-to-be-sold Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue: Sushi Nakazawa and BLT Prime by David Burke. Burke’s joint is absolutely my kind of place. It’s in the hotel lobby. The building used to be a post office before the Trump family converted it. The enormous glass-roofed lobby area is a marvel: put politics to one side and admit that it is an extraordinary achievement.

Saturday

February 15, 2020

Roger Kimball

California bound

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. I think it was from the late Roger Scruton, back when he was writing about wine for another magazine, that I learned the importance of being a terroiriste — not, nota bene, a terrorist. That, as Qasem Soleimani learned to his sorrow, is something else entirely. No, what Sir Roger had in mind was the importance of environment to the production of delicious wine. Terroir means the composition of the soil, yes, but it also means so much more. One dictionary sums it up as the ‘complete natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including...the soil, topography, and climate’.