David Butterfield

What explains The Spectator’s unprecedented success? No weekly in the world has matched its longevity: 196 years and 10,200 issues. In my history of The Spectator, 10,000 Not Out, I talk about the battles that shaped the magazine. It has long been a voice for classic liberal values and in its best moments, kept doing so even when support for those causes was unpopular. But when we look at its history, we see its best moments – and its shakier ones. The founding spirit of The Spectator was a humble-born Scotsman, whose energy and principle took London’s media class by storm. Robert Rintoul’s career south of the border began with the weekly newspaper The Atlas, but after two years he left in protest at owners who sought to ‘vulgarise and betwaddle’ the title.

We classicists peering into the past can sometimes be blindsided by the present. 2020 brings the charge that our discipline promotes racism. Last month, America’s Society for Classical Studies announced ‘the complicity of Classics as a field in constructing and participating in racist and anti-black educational structures and attitudes’. A pre-doctoral fellow at Princeton has enjoined ‘white classicists’ to ‘unlearn white supremacy in themselves’. And, closer to home, Oxford’s Faculty of Classics is being petitioned by many of its students to ‘acknowledge explicitly its own role in the proliferation of racist, colonialist, and white supremacist attitudes’. Have I really chosen the career of racism-pedlar?

In a summer where sport as we know it has been cruelly cancelled, opportunities to celebrate athletic heroism are hard to seek. But today, not one but two titanic achievements occurred independently – and only a few miles from each other. Both have a strong chance of being the country’s most impressive running feats of the coming decade, if boasting weren’t anathema to them. The 24-Hour Fell Record is what it sounds like: you have precisely one day of continuous running to cover as many of the Cumbrian mountains as possible, so long as you get back to the spot from where you started. When the early Victorian tourists first came to Lakeland, to survive a single ascent was deemed a pedestrian feat.

At last, with the partial easing of lockdown, we have the consolation of an escape into the countryside. There, in the unquestioning simplicity of it all, we can leave society’s struggles behind. A sweet idea, but now rather behind the times, as shown by BBC Countryfile’s recent stirring into action. In its programme last night, Dwayne Fields delivered a piece on how the countryside needs to lose its ‘barriers’ and become truly welcoming to all communities. Ethnic minorities, he worried, feel that they ‘don’t belong’ in the countryside. Fields has done a great deal to introduce inner-city communities to the countryside and is unquestionably an admirable man. But his framing of this subject is mistaken.

As print titles battle logistical disruption and falling sales from Covid-19, it’s worth saluting The Spectator’s long-lasting tenacity. It has appeared without fail now for 192 years, week in, week out. Its publication has continued through both world wars, numerous strikes and protests, power cuts, cholera outbreaks and terrorist attacks. Today, even as the country has gone into lockdown, it has maintained its rhythm, with staff compiling issues from their studies and kitchen tables. And next week, on St George’s Day, The Spectator will turn out its 10,000th issue, a benchmark reached by no other magazine in history. The path has not always been easy.

As normal life rapidly shuts up shop around us, there’s a need to salvage something positive from the chaos. So perhaps there’s a good story yet to be written about that oldest but most unfashionable of virtues, charity. Before you roll your eyes, I am not saying that, in a time of such sudden and sharp economic downturn, we must dig deep into our pockets to help those struggling more than us. That’s admirable behaviour at any time, and if it’s still an option for you, all power to your elbow. Instead, I have in mind those businesses and entrepreneurs that – by virtue of this sudden inversion of human behaviour – now find their profits soaring.

In 1978, an invitation was sent to some 200 members of Oxford’s Dangerous Sports Club, which simply read: ‘Tea, Rockall, Black Tie.’ The good news was that invitees had never visited this part of the UK; the bad was that it is way out west. Forget Land’s End, or the Western Isles, or even far-flung Fermanagh. First get to the Outer Hebrides and then head into the Atlantic for 230 miles or so. There a single tooth of granite, 60-foot high, will emerge from the waves. Welcome to Rockall, the last acquisition of the British Empire. Though known to the Vikings, and to map-makers since the 16th century, Rockall was until 1955 terra nullius: land claimed by no one. No wonder.

Sparks are flying across Oxford quads: an alarming proposal is afoot to make the study of Homer and Virgil, the two most influential poets of the ancient world, optional for Classics students. So why has it become national news for one university course to stop treating two ancient authors as compulsory set texts? Most of the noise is easy to understand. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey stand alongside Virgil’s Aeneid as the dominant texts of the classical tradition. Western literature literally begins with the complex melting pot of ‘Homer’. And, for many, the subsequent evolution of ancient literature reaches its zenith with Virgil, whose epic follows a troubled prince on his rocky journey from defeat at Troy to the hostile shores of Italy.

There are piles of stones and then there are piles of stones. Anyone can place one rock upon another, but it takes a special endeavour to get the Ordnance Survey to take notice. Once a clutch of cartographers formally recognise a cairn, it will stay mapped for centuries, if not millennia. Wander around Britain’s fells, moors and coastline and you’ll find all manner of rock piles punctuating the landscape. Often some 5,000 years old, these are our island’s most ancient standing constructions. Although they might look similar, cairns are not all the same. Summit cairns, for instance, indicate the precise pinnacles of hills.