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Recently, I was in my local park when I noticed a young girl staring at me with a puzzled expression. She then turned to her mother and asked: ‘Why is that man hugging a tree?’ It was a good question. Why was an old, cynical, embittered hack like me hugging a tree? The simple answer
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Cosmo Landesman says life is too short to watch boring shows; Alex Diggins reports back from the Bukhara art biennial; Lucy Dunn provides her notes on BuzzBallz – which featured at the Spectator’s Christmas party; and, Richard Bratby reviews L’amour des trois oranges at the Royal Northern College of Music and Ariodante at the
To walk out of a public performance before the end – be it the theater, a concert or a lecture – is not the done thing. It’s considered an antisocial act that disrupts the performance and thus other people’s pleasure. To walk out provokes tuts of disapproval and scowls of indignation. And yet while it’s
Table talk in London these days is so relentlessly gloomy that we need some irreverent juvenile banter to lighten things up
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery reports from court as the Spectator and Douglas Murray win the defamation cause brought against them by Mohammed Hijab; Cosmo Landesman defends those who stay silent over political issues; Henry Blofeld celebrates what has been a wonderful year for test cricket; David Honigmann reflects on the powder
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I’m one of the Silent People who sit on the sidelines of the great political events and debates of the present. We Silent People don’t sign on-line petitions or go on protests to show solidarity with this group or that one. We don’t tweet our outrage, or blog our bile. We prefer to keep what
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Would Trump really bomb Iran, asks Paul Wood (1:38); Katy Balls interviews Health Secretary Wes Streeting on NHS reform, Blairism and Game of Thrones (8:38); Olivia Potts examines the history – and decline – of the Easter staple, roast lamb (18:25); the explorer Benedict Allen says Erling Kagge and Neil
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This week: should the assisted dying bill be killed off? Six months after Kim Leadbeater MP launched the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, a group of Labour MPs have pronounced it ‘irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law’. They say the most basic aspects of the bill – having gone through its
From our UK edition
When I turned 70 in September, I had a panic attack. I was certain that my romantic life was over. I’d finally crossed over from middle-age into old age and had joined that sad tribe of the unshaggable. My time as a fun-loving lothario was at an end. Goodbye hot wild monkey sex – hello
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For me, one of the great pleasures of public transport is getting into a conversation with a stranger. But in our age of smart-phones and headphones, where everyone is plugged into their own private space, it’s a pleasure that’s becoming increasingly rare. So when I heard of a new scheme by Transport for London (TfL)
I may be thirty-six on the inside, but on the outside I definitely look seventy
Everyone has at least one friend that none of their other friends can stand, someone you love but everyone else loathes
The secret to working a room is to know when you’re in a room that can’t be worked
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I’ve been to a talk by two very clever and talented men: the American novelist and critic Jonathan Lethem and the English documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. They were talking about Lethem’s book about his art collection, Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture. Never have I left a talk with such a warm glow of
The tribes have a lot in common
I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship lately because I recently turned seventy and was considering throwing a big birthday party
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Now that I’m about to turn 70, I’m wondering: shall I grow old gracefully, or disgracefully? Everyone I know, young and old, tells me that I must go disgracefully (and that’s how they plan to go, or so they say). It seems that growing old gracefully has gone out of style – especially for women
There are writers and journalists who get public recognition all the time. Alas, I’m not one
I meant to experience Beauty. Wonder. Awe and all that jouissance jazz. Instead I’m thinking: help!
London literary life in the late 1970s to the late 1980s looks from today like a lost golden age
