Matthew Parris

Last Sunday I collected a waistcoat made from my own pet. From the same source came a hat, gloves, scarf, and a teddy bear wearing a little waistcoat of its own, though (saucily) no trousers. A lady called Chan Brown, from Chesterfield, has organised this for me. I keep llamas, and she spins. She belongs

New South Wales The name of the station seemed to ring a bell. An hour or so south of Sydney, and through the window of my double-decker Australian railway carriage, I could read the sign ‘Thirroul’. Wasn’t that the little seaside town where D.H. Lawrence stayed with his wife, Frieda, and where he began his

Those awful bombs in Madrid rather overshadowed a less sensational little story unfolding during the Spanish general election just passed. My brother-in-law stood for the office of senator on an anti-bullfighting ticket, and though he stood no chance of winning and never expected to, he did exceptionally well. Here I must pause. I do not

After writing this I shall set out for Iraq. The Times is sending me there, I am enormously lucky to go, and hope to see as much as possible in the ten short days of my trip. The prospect has concentrated my mind on something which has vexed me and others who opposed the US–British

Inside Baghdad there is another Baghdad. It is called the Green Zone and my Times colleague Richard Beeston wrote about it in The Spectator a few weeks ago. I visited the Green Zone last month. This was virtual reality. Outside lies a dirty and dangerous country. Within, you encounter a magic park where newly planted

Very occasionally in the life of a nation comes the need for a short period of dictatorship. Not for major reform: democracy can easily manage historic change. No, it’s the little things which dictators do so well. General Franco, for example, rationalised Spanish spelling. In the sorting out of obstinate silliness, democrats lose heart and

Bradford is to demolish huge swaths of its own centre. Acres of hateful Sixties concrete are to be pulverised in the year ahead, according to a tiny article in the Guardian this week. Much of Broadway, Cheapside and Petergate are to be bulldozed as part of the city’s programme of ‘reinventing’ its core. An architect,

Should liberal internationalists feel irritated when neoconservative hawks piggyback on to the successes of our own approach, and take the credit for themselves? No, we should feel satisfied that they want to, for it is a kind of repentance. Their tantrums past and the damage obvious, we can be pretty confident that they will not

How incredible it is,’ wrote Stephen Glover in last week’s Spectator’s Media studies, ‘and how depressing,’ that Richard Desmond might buy the Telegraph. He went on to paint a most unflattering picture of the minor media magnate, his main complaint being that Mr Desmond is a pornographer because he owns publications that print pornography. I

Swimmers, scanning the sea for signs of danger, look beyond what breaks the surface. It is by the slight but unexpected troubling of the waters that hidden peril is often best located. Where something jagged lurks beneath or where two currents collide, a sudden agitated choppiness in a small patch of sea may tell us

The view, I thought, appeared much as it would to a young barnacle goose. I was diving out of a blustery, dove-grey sky, my wing tips tipping cloud. Far below I could see the browns and greens, the heather and grass, of a big, low-lying Hebridean island. To the east lay the Scottish mainland. From

A charge should be laid at the door of those who urged America onward into Iraq this year, and it should come not from pacifists, United Nations groupies or Uncle Sam-baiters, but from those on the Right who think that a great power does have special responsibilities, including – sometimes – a responsibility to intervene.