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29 min listen
The Best of Notes on… gathers the funniest, sharpest and most wonderfully random pieces from The Spectator’s beloved miscellany column. For more than a decade, these short, sharp essays have uncovered the intrigue in the everyday and the delight in digression. To purchase the book, go to spectator.co.uk/shop On this special episode of Spectator Out Loud, you can hear from:
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Knock, knock. Who’s there? Well, according to the app it was the Evri man at 10.27, the Yodel man at 11.17, the post lady at 13.44 and the nursery-run mum with double buggy at 15.22. What romance, what mystery in the age of the Ring doorbell? Every coming and going, every missed parcel and key
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P-p-pick up a pebble. Feel its weight in your palm. Roll it over under your thumb. Any good? Not sure? Shuck it back on the shingle. Plenty of fish in the sea and more pebbles still on the shore. In The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter’s Guide, Clarence Ellis, pebble-spotter par excellence, opens with
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Show me your downstairs loo and I will tell you who you are. Better yet, show me your kitchen, bedroom, billiard room and man cave. Can we know a man – or woman – by their house? The ‘footsteps’ approach to biography argues that to really understand a subject, a biographer must visit his childhood
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39 min listen
In this week’s Book Club podcast, I’m joined by the writer and critic Laura Freeman to talk about her book Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists. Laura’s book is the portrait of one of those figures who, without ever quite taking the spotlight themselves, was nevertheless hugely influential in kindling the love
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‘And now the end is here / And so I face the final curtain…’ You said it, Frank. The lights dim, the curtain falls, exeunt all to rapturous applause. Too rapturous, if you ask me. The standing ovation, once the exception, is now the rule. Post-Covid, I got it. After months of empty theatres and
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‘Sides to middle’, that’s the cry. When your foot goes through the flat sheet in the night, there’s only one thing for it: scissors down the centre, then sew it edge to edge. Good as new – for as long as your stitches hold up. If you’ve paid for Egyptian cotton, you cannot cut your
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21 min listen
On this week’s episode, Jonathan Miller says that whoever wins France’s election on Sunday, the country is going to the dogs. (01:00) After, Cindy Yu says that China’s online censors are struggling to suppress critics of the Shanghai lockdown. (07:47) And, to finish, Laura Freeman reviews a Walt Disney exhibition at the Wallace Collection. (12:06)
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Extensive research went into the writing of this piece. First, I lay on the sofa watching Disney’s Cinderella. Then, Beauty and the Beast. Then, because I’m assiduous about these things, Frozen. The singalong version. I wish I could tell you that the sofa was a rococo number with ormolu mounts and a pink satin seat,
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42 min listen
In this week’s episode: Is Putin guilty of war crimes? For this week’s cover piece, The Spectator’s Editor Fraser Nelson looks at the risks and rewards of labelling Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers war criminals. He joins the podcast, followed by Michael Bryant, the author of A World History of War Crimes, who writes in
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A house around the corner is on its fourth kitchen in a decade. Every two or three years, the house changes hands, the pristine kitchen comes out and a newer, pristiner kitchen goes in. They are always white, they are always shiny, and when I peer through the basement windows there is nothing in the
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It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It is the first week of December and I still haven’t started my cards. My friend Charlotte was at it in October. She signed up for a lino-cutting class, cut holly boughs and robin redbreasts and
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Give us a snog. Pucker up at the Christmas party. Kiss me quick at the Nativity play. Will you be snogging this season? Thérèse Coffey, Secretary of State for Work, Pensions and Office Passion, has spoken. ‘I don’t think there should be much snogging under the mistletoe.’ she told Robert Peston on ITV. Sajid Javid,
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A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits, teeth. Suck it in, push ’em out, show your pearly whites. Leaving aside David LaChapelle’s portrait of Pamela Anderson, there’s a shortage of Ts in Phillip Prodger’s Face Time. This looks likea coffee-table book but
The Mirror and the Palette by Jennifer Higgie and Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack reviewed
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On a clear day, from the balcony of Tullie House Museum & Art Gallery in Carlisle, you can see the McVitie’s factory. If the wind were in the right direction, I like to think you’d smell digestives on the breeze. Originally, it was the factory of Carr’s, bakers of table water biscuits since 1831. Carr’s
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An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets, having spent a fortune on the atrium, the concert hall, the galleries, spent pennies on the bogs. The smallest rooms at Charles Jencks’s Cosmic House are among the loveliest loos in London with windows on
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Jules Léotard was blessed in his name. It might have been quite different had he been called, say, Jules Droupé. As it was, his family name was lithe, elongated, taut. It was a name with stretch. Léotard was born in Toulouse in 1838, the son of a gymnastics teacher. The young Jules might have become
The people have a right to know what’s on Boris’s wall
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Press officers, breathe easy. This is not another column attacking the National Trust. Actually, I tell a lie. It is. But my complaint isn’t bullying or slavery or LGBTQ+ery or even chocolate Easter eggery. It is more single and specific: the National Trust does not speak architecture. Or if it does, it’s keeping shtum. Since
