Culture

A suitably mad crowd gathered at the Spectator offices last night to celebrate the launch of Douglas Murray’s new book, The Madness of Crowds. Mr Steerpike marvelled at Mr Murray’s ability to bring such an intriguing mix of people together: where else in the world could you find Kevin Spacey, Paul Joseph Watson and a member of the bin Laden family in the same room? Almost a hundred journalists, authors, politicians, pundits and friends flocked to the Old Queen Street office. The guests included Michael Gove, Rod Liddle, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Nadira Naipaul, Martin Ivens, Sarah Baxter, Toby Young, Ruth Dudley Edwards, Henry Newman, Freddie Sayers, Dan Hitchens, Iain Martin, Jacob Burda and Bloomsbury's Robin Baird-Smith.

Your latest challenge was to come up with a fable for the 21st century, complete with moral. James Michie, my predecessor in the judge’s seat, was a celebrated translator of fables and if you were looking for inspiration, and don’t speak French, his 1973 rendering of a selection by La Fontaine serves as a shining example (they were described by the exacting Geoffrey Grigson as ‘earthier and sharper than Marianne Moore’s’). Though this challenge didn’t see you at your sharpest — some entries tended towards the heavy-handed — those that stood out are printed below and earn their authors £25 apiece. W.J. Webster One day a man was strolling through a wood when he heard a bird singing.

This week's books podcast was recorded live at a Spectator event in Central London. My guest is the distinguished historian Frank Dikötter, whose new book - expanding from his award-winning trilogy on Chairman Mao - considers the nature of tyranny. How To Be A Dictator: The Cult of Personality in the Twentieth Century looks at what unites and what divides the regimes of dictators from Mussolini to Mengistu.

Eighty years on from the start of the Second World War, my guest in this week’s podcast is Ian Sansom — who’s talking about 'September 1, 1939', the Auden poem that marked the beginning of that war. Ian’s new book is a 'biography' of the poem, and he talks about how it showcases all that is both best and worst in Auden’s work, how Auden first rewrote and then disowned it, and how Auden’s posthumous reputation has had some unlikely boosters in Richard Curtis and Osama Bin Laden.