Camilla Swift is the supplements editor of The Spectator.
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I’m sure every ‘horsey’ person has been asked the same question: ‘Who should I put my money on in the Grand National?’ No matter whether you’re a dressage rider or a four-in-hand driver, come mid-April everyone wants to hear your views on the most-watched horse race in Britain. £300 million is expected to be bet
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This Saturday, 600 million viewers are expected to tune in to watch The Grand National. Horse racing is the second biggest spectator sport in the UK, and Aintree’s most famous race – in fact, Britain’s most famous race – will be screened in every corner of the globe. £300 million of bets will be placed
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In large cities, a school can weave itself into the fabric of its locality almost without anyone noticing it’s there. But in smaller towns and villages a school, particularly a large one, can play a much greater part in the day-to-day life of its inhabitants. In some towns and villages, the school is even the
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What should we do with difficult students? The ones who distract everyone else in the class, and don’t care how they are punished? Some schools exclude struggling pupils because they are worried that their exams performance might drag down the class’s grades. But children have a right to an education, says Sophia Waugh, so we
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International Women’s Day is the official appointed day on which to celebrate women’s achievements. But actually, I’d argue that the first day of the Cheltenham Festival is as good a day as any to celebrate women in racing; and there are lots of them. Women are making their names in racing, on an equal playing
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Over the few years, a battle has been quietly simmering between farming communities and a conservation organisation who want to reintroduce the Eurasian lynx to the UK. The cats have been extinct in the UK for well over a thousand years, and while farmers worry that the big cats will threaten their sheep, Lynx UK
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‘Watamu is my favourite place in the world,’ my friend declared when I told her where I was going for a long weekend. For her, Watamu means Christmas. Like many visitors to Hemingways and other hotels alowhang the Watamu coast, her family are loyal repeat customers, returning year after year to this little village on
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‘There is a profound mismatch between the way we are educating our young and the world we’re educating them for, and what should, and could, be happening.’ So says Sir Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of Buckingham University. Seldon is well known for promoting novel ideas when it comes to education.
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The theatre, we are told, is increasingly becoming the domain of the privately educated. The Guardian has even claimed that the working-class actor is ‘a disappearing breed’, and it’s certainly true that public school-educated actors such as Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston, Damian Lewis (the list goes on) are rarely off our screens. But
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It would be a cliché to say that Christian Heinrich fell into his career in education. But really, there isn’t any other way of describing his route into teaching. In his final year of a degree in American literature, he returned home to nurse his sick mother. When she passed away, his old prep school
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State or private? Years of saving every penny in a bid to scrape together enough to pay the school fees, or months of cramming to get your child a scholarship, a bursary… anything to ease the pain. Is it worth it? Fraser Nelson is going through this process, and writes about his dilemma. Charlotte Metcalf,
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‘Any tips for the National?’ I think anyone who has even a vague connection to a horse has been asked this question over the last week, and it’s a pretty impossible one to answer. With a field of forty and some very tough obstacles to get over safely on the way, all you can really
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We Brits tend not to be as superstitious as those in some other countries; well at least that’s what I thought. In the States, for example, it’s common practice not to have a 13th floor in hotels, for fear it might bring bad luck. No such thing would happen over here, would it? Surely we
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With the Cheltenham Festival been and gone, all eyes are on Aintree and the Grand National. These courses feature in Tom Peacock’s Remarkable Racecourses, as do other familiar names: Ascot, Epsom, Goodwood, Chantilly and so on. But this isn’t simply a rundown of the most famous racecourses in the world. It’s more a whistle-stop, round-the-world
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Traditionally, the Tory party have always had the support of the countryside. The hunting, shooting and fishing fraternity were solid Conservative stock – and if anyone really drove the final nail into the coffin of Labour rural vote, it was Tony Blair. The early noughties saw numerous marches through central London protesting not just about
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We hear a lot about what EU leaders think and want. But how do the people who actually live in the European Union feel about the way it operates, and how do they view the future? That’s what this supplement aims to get to grips with, with the aid of data from the Századvég Foundation’s
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When choosing a boarding school for your child, what’s the most important thing to bear in mind? For some it will be the academic results, for others the location, the range of subjects or the variety of extra-curricular activities on offer. But for many, a big concern will be the pastoral side: who will be
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When you see the name Lawson in The Spectator, it would be understandable if you thought of financial or political matters. And it’s true that Tom Lawson, the headmaster of Eastbourne College, did study PPE at Oxford’s Christ Church like his father, Nigel, and his half-brother, Dominic, before him. But unlike the rest of his
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Is it the responsibility of schools to teach children about relationships and sexual consent? Or is that something parents ought to be teaching at home? This is the question Joanna Williams addresses in our opening feature. She takes a look at the changing face of sex education, and talks to some of its more evangelical
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To a classic car buff, nothing can beat the sheer joy of owning one for yourself. But is there actually any investment value in them? That’s the question Henry Jeffreys posed in the pages of Spectator Money back in 2016. It’s a difficult one to answer; he discovered that in recent years, classic cars have
