Lionel Shriver is a columnist at The Spectator and author of We Need to Talk About Kevin, among other books.
Sometimes it’s worth addressing what didn’t happen. For one exasperating aspect of appearing on television news is leaving the studio kicking yourself for what you failed to say. Heading home from Broadcasting House, I’ll often impotently mutter all those killer arguments that fled my head when they might have counted for something. Yet during my
In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when coming to the aid of a family whose distress had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. Composed as a letter to a friend whose husband did indeed perish in the Twin Towers, the
One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new material. Any pundit keen to highlight the grievous injustices committed haughtily in the name of justice these days is spoilt for choice. So: Augsburg University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. A student reads aloud a quote from James
Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny? Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered:
Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny? Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered:
When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read The Spectator. So: back to the Irish border — a demarcation that takes up no geographical space, but has still mysteriously dominated a dozen years of my life. Oh, well. What’s one more afternoon, then?
When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read The Spectator. So: back to the Irish border — a demarcation that takes up no geographical space, but has still mysteriously dominated a dozen years of my life. Oh, well. What’s one more afternoon, then?
One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too many people,’ she said. From among the many other piquant factoids in Paul Morland’s The Human Tide, I was unnerved to learn that ‘Hitler was obsessed with demography’ too. Whether you also suffer from this
Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts
Pitching your tent for weeks on end in the cold and mud, with no power or plumbing. Running in a pack after accelerating lorries and clutching frantically at the back door handles. Risking not only your own life but even the lives of your children by crowding into unseaworthy dinghies, in which to drift precariously
We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Lionel Shriver on the publishing world’s quest for diversity: I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me
We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 8: Lionel Shriver on the Brett Kavanaugh hearings: Following Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about being sexually assaulted by the US Supreme Court nominee when he was 17, numerous women on American news reported that listening to her terrible story made
I’ve cycled for primary transportation for 53 years. Accordingly, I’m not naive about the degree of resentment — nay, loathing — that the general population harbours towards what I’m reluctant to dub the ‘cycling community’, since no group of people behaves less like brethren. You may hate cyclists, but you can’t possibly hate cyclists more
Behold, the most incendiary statistic in America: the Census Bureau’s projection of when whites will become a minority in what last century was ‘their own’ country. (In only 1980, 80 per cent of Americans were white. Mind, where the US leads, Europe often follows.) When in 2008 that red-letter date moved up to 2042, notes
I’d recommend any aspiring writer to marry a jazz drummer. It’s done wonders for my powers of concentration. If I can write while my husband is practising rolls, or rehearsing with his quartet loudly enough that I don’t know why they didn’t just set up in my study, or worst of all tuning his drums
At my lecture in Sheffield last week, the final question in an otherwise temperate Q&A was antagonistic. My last Spectator column led the man to conclude that I was a Trump supporter. Was this true? I was affronted. And let me tell you, these millennials are on to something. I spend way too much time
Trump has hinted that Democrats may have been secretly funding the ‘caravan’ of more than 7,000 Honduran immigrants trooping towards the United States. I don’t think so. In the lead-up to the midterms, if any party would sponsor by far the largest organised mass migration to the US on record, Republicans would. For politically, the
Following Christine Blasey Ford’s Senate testimony about being sexually assaulted by the US Supreme Court nominee when he was 17, numerous women on American news reported that listening to her terrible story made them cry. I didn’t cry. Indeed, my reaction to Ford’s statement was at such odds with the garment–rending anguish of my fellow
‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family row: most stories have more than two sides. But in the take-no-prisoners world of #MeToo, there’s only one side. All women are victims and all women are truthful. Any man who’s had a shadow of
This column is not in my interest. But then, not for the first time. I cannot count the conversations conducted in recent years with reasonable, moderate people when expressing what should be reasonable, moderate views, during which my companions exhibit signs of drastic anxiety: fidgeting, darting pupils, twisting hands. The mumbling under the breath can
