Alexander Larman

Alexander Larman is an author and the US books editor of The Spectator.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Will Burnham and the King get on?

From our UK edition

Now that Britain’s latest prime minister has gone through the ritual of ‘kissing hands’ with the monarch – these days, a small bow tends to be the preferred option instead – there will be a great deal of whispering in Buckingham Palace as to what the relationship between the King and his latest first minister is going to be like. The first photograph of the two shaking hands showed the new prime minister smiling broadly and enthusiastically, and Charles, understandably, seeming rather more restrained. This may be a preview of things to come.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

The Odyssey will take audiences by storm

The Odyssey famously begins “Tell me, O Muse, of the man of many talents,” or similar depending on which translation you prefer. There is an irony that Homer himself might have enjoyed in the way his literary work – itself about the malleability of truth, fame and reputation – has been translated into a Christopher Nolan’s film that is being pilloried for being woke, excessively revisionist, in love with color-blind and trans-blind casting, etc. This came as something of a surprise to us who had Sir Christopher down as a small-c conservative, whose films affirm the sanctity of the heteronormative nuclear family and, in The Dark Knight Rises, positively rejects the idea of left-wing insurgency.

the odyssey
Alexander Larman

Long live the working lunch

From our UK edition

Every time statistics are released about our lunching habits, I become ever more depressed. Apparently, as many as seven in ten of us fail to leave our desks during so-called ‘lunch hour’, miserably chomping on our identikit meal deal or Pret sandwiches. And, of course, very few of us ever manage to take anything like the amount of time we’re supposedly due for our lunches. A recent survey revealed that the median amount of time that we have as our midday breaks is a trifling 34 minutes. But, from a legal perspective, this is more than our due. Government guidelines declare: ‘Workers have the right to one uninterrupted 20-minute rest break during their working day, if they work more than six hours a day. This could be a tea or lunch break.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Prince Harry has lost his most high-stakes gamble

It was always going to go this way. Every gambler eventually loses, and the higher profile that loss, the greater the eventual humiliation. But today’s judgement that Prince Harry as well as his other high-profile litigants – including Elton John, Elizabeth Hurley and Baroness Lawrence – have lost their claims completely against Associated Newspapers for unlawful information gathering, thereby bringing to a deeply humiliating and unimaginably expensive end to their crusade against the media, represents the end of the biggest gamble that this litigation-prone prince has ever taken. Anyone watching the trial will be unsurprised by the verdict.

Monday

Alexander Larman

The vulgarity of the Swift-Kelce wedding

When Taylor Swift, the billionaire pop star, announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, the rather less wealthy (although still multi-millionaire) NFL player, she chose to mark the occasion by declaring, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” It was rather a nice way for Swift to refer to herself and her forthcoming nuptials. Those who, like me, have always been fans of both her and her music had hopes that her wedding to Kelce would not become the usual hideous exercise in celebrity tackiness. Boy, was I wrong.

Taylor Swift
Alexander Larman

Tom Hiddleston and the pitfalls of advertising

From our UK edition

Amidst the summer’s plethora of advertisements aimed at the moronic, desperate and gullible, an especially crass one stands out. Ralph Lauren have decided, for reasons best known to themselves, that their well-heeled and preppy customers need the unholy duo of the actor Tom Hiddleston and a computer-generated ‘Polo Bear’ to advertise their product.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Kate Middleton is the royal family’s best ambassador

From our UK edition

If you had been queuing up to buy tickets at Wimbledon yesterday, then you might have been forgiven for doubting your eyesight to see none other than the Princess of Wales appear. Like a fairy godmother, she was there to distribute the first few tickets to those who had already been waiting, in some cases, for several hours that day. Princess Catherine – or Kate Middleton, as she was popularly known in her former, non-royal capacity – was wearing a suitably stylish pale blue linen suit in her quest to bring a touch of stardust to SW19 on the fourth day of the championships. She bantered with the thirsty and weary tennis fans and told them, in a splendidly English touch, that 'you must be desperate to get in and have a drink' after queuing uncomfortably in the heat for ages.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Why shouldn’t Queen Camilla meet J.K. Rowling?

From our UK edition

One of the many likeable characteristics of Queen Camilla is that she has a clear, full-throated passion for literature. She has taken her husband, the King, away from his usual diet of intellectually respectable but slightly stuffy authors – such as his mentor Laurens van der Post – and introduced him to the likes of Jilly Cooper, Elizabeth Jane Howard and E. F. Benson. Yet for all her bookish associations, the latest meeting that she had with the country’s bestselling – and most controversial – author is likely to arouse strong passions on both sides of the political divide. It has also prompted a particular question: is Camilla herself a Terf?  The picture that was posted on the royal family’s social media accounts yesterday was innocuous enough. The Queen met J.K.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

Why Yesteryear is the controversial bestseller of 2026

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on social media in the past couple of years, you will probably be familiar with the tradwife phenomenon that has grown up as a reaction against the harder-edged and more strident girlboss feminism that itself threatened to become the dominant form of discourse towards the end of the last decade. Tradwifery, a form of embrace of traditional domestic roles that concentrates on the woman as homemaker, mother and carer while allowing her husband (always a husband, never a "partner”) to fulfill masculine aspects of patriarch and hunter-gatherer, has been decried by some as a right-wing coded backwards step into submissiveness. Others have described it as a welcome return to common sense and social cohesion.

yesteryear Caro Claire Burke (Riley Haakon)
Alexander Larman

The peerless Penelope Keith

From our UK edition

The news that Dame Penelope Keith has died at the age of 86 has devastated lovers of great British humour, to say nothing of Spectator readers. The two are, after all, closely linked. Keith was that rare actress who was the lead in not one but two seminal sitcoms, The Good Life and To The Manor Born. It would perhaps be an exaggeration to describe her performances as the aspirational Margo Leadbetter and the aristocratic Aubrey fforbes-Hamilton as showing thespian range. But there was no actress better at skewering the pretensions and absurdities of a certain kind of Englishwoman. Even today, if you say of someone that they are a ‘Penelope Keith type’, it is shorthand for Middle England in excelsis – even if that type is vanishing far quicker than is desirable.

Monday

Alexander Larman

Britain won’t mind if Meghan stays away

From our UK edition

If you wanted to contrast the public lives of the two warring sides of the Royal Family, last weekend gave us the perfect opportunity to do so. The Princess of Wales showed, once again, that she is the Firm’s greatest public asset by completing the gruelling Three Peaks Challenge – in which participants climb Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon over the course of 24 hours – on behalf of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, which treated her for her illness in 2024. The picture that she put on social media showed her looking exhausted, unsurprisingly, but also justifiably proud of a singular achievement that does credit to her and to the wider Royal Family, as well as raising awareness of the Royal Marsden’s work.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Why are there no good films about Independence Day?

This month marks 30 years since the release of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, a science-fiction blockbuster best viewed as the anti-Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg’s 1977 film suggested we would be better off finding common ground with extraterrestrial visitors; Emmerich’s more bombastic picture stuck to the (surprisingly Trumpian) idea that aliens were evil, wished to destroy our planet and must be resisted at all costs, preferably with nuclear weapons. It is not a subtle film, with the most fondly remembered moment coming in the famous shot when the White House is destroyed by an alien spacecraft.

Madonna
Alexander Larman

What went wrong with the Madonna biopic?

Madonna Louise Ciconne has had one of the more eventful American lives of the past half-century, and it is little wonder that she might wish to depict it on screen in a big-budget film. After all, as the recent success of the Queen and Michael Jackson biopics have shown, it doesn’t matter how good the pictures are, as long as they include the best-known songs that made the artists household names and a smattering of the drama that led to their current eminence. Even if, as in Michael, it was the decision to omit most of the really interesting events that led to cries of whitewashing. Yet there’s been no Madonna biopic, and this is not because she has refused to cooperate. Far from it.

Alexander Larman

Is King Charles really being open about his finances?

From our UK edition

When it was announced that King Charles was going to become the first monarch in history to release details of how much income tax he paid, it seemed like a watershed moment for the royal family. The Firm have, traditionally, been opaque when it comes to all things financial. Those who have tried to delve into precisely how much the various members are worth, whether in terms of private family money or inherited wealth, have usually come a cropper through sheer lack of evidence, something that even the official royal website sniggeringly acknowledges.

Wednesday

Alexander Larman

Is the Armie Hammer comeback going to happen?

When the actor Armie Hammer looked like he was on the verge of becoming a big star, it was an endless source of amusement for gossip columnists and sarcastic online commenters that he never quite got to the A-list. It wasn’t that he didn’t get the roles; leads in everything from The Lone Ranger to The Man From U.N.C.L.E looked, on paper, as if they should catapult him into the stratosphere. His chiseled good looks and muscular physique seemed to suggest that he had all the ingredients for Hollywood longevity. And he could act, too, as could be seen by his much-acclaimed roles in Call Me By Your Name and his breakthrough part in David Fincher’s The Social Network. But then it all went horribly, bizarrely wrong.

Armie Hammer

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

The political awkwardness of the 2026 Tony Awards

Every year, the American theater world gathers in New York to celebrate the best of the best, and every year, writers like me ask why the judges have made increasingly baffling decisions.  On the surface, it seems as if the 79th Tony Awards, hosted by Pink from Radio City Music Hall, were business as usual. The new revival of Death of a Salesman, with Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf and directed by Joe Mantello, was the big winner with six awards including Best Revival and Best Featured Actress. It also represented the partial redemption of the once-powerful, now-humbled super-producer Scott Rudin, whose penchant for big-star vehicles based on classic novels and plays was evident.

tony
Alexander Larman

It’s time to turn the page on ‘romantasy’

I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first ‘romantasy bookshop’, Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers.  Marot told the Oxford Mail: ‘The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women's voices and desires. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.

Saturday

Alexander Larman

Rosamund Pike was right to berate her phone-using audience

From our UK edition

Many people find the idea of actors breaking the fourth wall while on stage mortifying. As such, they will react to the news that Rosamund Pike, the Olivier award-winning star of the new play Inter Alia, berated an anonymous member of the audience during the curtain call for her show last weekend with skin-crawling embarrassment. Yet Pike was wholly justified in her actions. During the performance of a play which deals with some hot-button issues of family and sexual abuse, the actress observed someone sending a text in the particularly emotional denouement. After taking her applause, she decided to say something about it. Pike expressed her justified displeasure at the texter’s actions.

Friday

Alexander Larman

Did Andrew need to charge his Royal Lodge tenants full rent?

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was photographed driving yesterday with a large bruise on his face. Whichever unfortunate ‘well-placed source’ that has the responsibility for reassuring the public about the disgraced former royal’s wellbeing insisted that the injury was not down to some outraged former lover or member of the public attacking him. Nevertheless, they said, it could not be revealed for ‘medical confidentiality’. However disfiguring the injury, however, it seems insignificant when compared to the even more bruising round of revelations that have emerged about Andrew’s financial situation – this time involving his former home of Royal Lodge.

Tuesday

Alexander Larman

How the YouTubers beat Star Wars

Last weekend saw the most unlikely battle between David and Goliath. The little film that could was none other than the psychological horror film Backrooms. It was made on a microscopic budget (in relative terms) of $10 million, yet went on to gross a staggering $81.4 million in the US alone in its opening weekend. And the big film that couldn’t was the not-so-eagerly awaited The Mandalorian and Grogu, which had a 70 percent drop at the box office from its (relatively) underwhelming opening weekend. Unless something wholly unexpected happens, it will conclude its run as the lowest-grossing Star Wars property, confirming the predictions of those who suggested that Disney have run the brand into the ground spectacularly.

Kane Parsons