One of these days, dismounting from his high horse, Brian Cox is going to suffer a terrible injury. The Scottish mummer, long resident in New York, cares so deeply about the state of our world that he pins up notices weekly, like a headmaster riled beyond endurance by rotters in the lower fifth. Cox has
When it comes to making friends on foreign fields the Barmy Army plants flags of conquest all over the world. Although it exists primarily to organise overseas tours for followers of the England cricket team, this regiment of happy wanderers is essentially a glee club for people who enjoy watching cricket abroad in the winter
English cricket, in its joyless pursuit of moral purity, has banned naughty jokes. There can be no other explanation for its punishment of Phillip Hodson, a man who has given his life to the summer game as player, administrator, and benefactor, and now finds himself fined £1,000. Hodson, a former president of Marylebone Cricket Club,
One of the peachiest moments in a life of unrepentant tavern-dwelling was my introduction to P.J. Clarke’s on Third Avenue. Here was a bar from central casting – Billy Wilder mocked it up, after a fashion, in The Lost Weekend – and the dollop of cream on this peach was the jukebox. P.J. Clarke’s was
The fairground attendant has stepped off the carousel. Amol Rajan, with all his honours on, is standing down from Radio 4’s Today programme, the breakfast show that sends us out into the world feeling a little bit braver, to set up his own company. What took him so long? Many listeners may think he established
The Ship of Fools lies rigged and masted, awaiting departure for Cloud Cuckoo Land. But lo! here come a few stragglers. They’re wearing cloth caps and clogs, and carrying buckets of coal. By ’eck, they must be northerners! Clamber aboard, noble savages, we are ready to cast off. Steerage, purser. You can’t beat a good
Norman Lebrecht, who attends concerts as frequently as falcons swoop over St John’s Wood, has declared 2025 to be a terrible year for music. We are at the mercy of political activists, he thinks, and he has a point. Zealots, particularly those who pursue pro-Palestinian causes, are relentless troublemakers for whom an undefended concert hall
It was a madhouse in Perth, in the latest instalment of sport’s oldest international skirmish. England, who opted to bat after Ben Stokes won the toss, were skittled before tea for 172: no score at all. Stokes then galvanised his men to take nine wickets before stumps, the captain leading the way with five strikes
Poor Tom Daley. The cherubic diver, who dazzled as a 14-year-old at the Peking Olympics, turning the heads of Chinese girls like spinning jennies, seems to have banged his head on the board once too often. He won friends everywhere with his easy manner and Colgate smile. The boy next door, people thought, who ran
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Max Jeffery examines Britain’s new hard left alliance; Sam Leith wonders what Prince Andrew is playing; Michael Henderson reads his letter from Berlin; Madeline Grant analyses the demise of the American ‘wasp’ – or White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant; and, Julie Bindel ponders the disturbing allure of sex robots. Produced and
We saw the world end in Berlin, again. Another Ring Cycle – hurrah! – in the beautiful Staatsoper theatre on Unter den Linden. Christian Thielemann led the house’s superb orchestra from the dawn of Creation in Das Rheingold to the downfall of the Gods in Götterdämerung. It was a brisk Ring, coming in at seven
‘Books are a load of crap’, wrote Larkin the librarian, for a bit of fun. But some books are not very good, no matter what guff they put on the cover. Those promotional blurbs, where adverbs and adjectives jostle for supremacy, are often as false as Judas. Shami Chakrabarti, for instance, plugs With the Law
‘Prizes are for little boys,’ said Charles Ives, the American composer, ‘and I’m a grown-up.’ It’s a pretty sound rule of thumb. The prizes worth having are usually those which reflect a body of work, not a single achievement. Cary Grant, the greatest leading man in the history of cinema, never won an Academy Award.
They have been blowing out candles for Fawlty Towers, and it is meet and right so to do. Fifty years old this month, John Cleese’s portrait of a Torquay hotelier at war with the world remains a masterpiece of British comedy. But there’s another Seventies romp we should not ignore, which was just as funny,
Miriam Margolyes is on the road, bringing joy to every corner of the kingdom, and aren’t we the lucky ones? It’s a kingdom she no longer has much time for, if she ever did, however hard the coiners of trite phrases try to dress her in the garb of a ‘national treasure’. When the tour
Like the fearful townsfolk of Dodge City awaiting the arrival of outlaws, the residents of Notting Hill have been chalking off the hours. Many have resorted to drilling wooden boards over their windows and doors. Some have hired private security and left the city for the weekend. It’s Carnival once again, that annual ritual of
Fran Lebowitz, the apparently acid-tongued commentator on Manhattan manners, will slip through British customs next month to dazzle the easily dazzled. Though to judge by the interview she granted an earnest lady in the Observer, other verbs leap to mind. From this distance it looks suspiciously like a fog of self-regard. According to the profiler,
‘You can always tell a proper lover of cricket’, Michael Kennedy, the great music critic, liked to say. ‘It’s whether they can appreciate a draw.’ A hit, a palpable hit. By concluding a magnificent Test series at two matches each, after India’s victory in the fifth game at the Oval, even England’s disappointed players may
The Proms – the BBC Proms, to stick a handle on its jug – remains a good deed in a naughty world. Eight weeks of orchestral music, mainly, performed nightly at the Royal Albert Hall by artists from every continent, for as little as £8 if you are prepared to stand. One of those artists,
The Irish problem has existed for centuries, though the nature of that problem is not always easy to define. It used to be political, though relations between English and Irish people on a personal level have usually been harmonious. There are still political problems, because identity – the question of to whom we owe our
