Molly Guinness

Crimea’s Tatars are nervous after Russia’s annexation of the territory. The Tatars, Sunni Muslims who account for 12 per cent of Crimea’s population, boycotted Sunday’s referendum worried that the Russians would impose repressive and discriminatory laws on them. Reading Bohdan Nahaylo’s 1980 article, Murder of a Nation*, you can see why. First, Stalin deported the entire Crimean Tatar nation. ‘In the early hours of 19 May 1944, some 238,000 people were abruptly awoken by units of the Soviet security forces and within minutes herded into cattle trucks. Sealed in without food or water, they were transported several thousand miles eastwards and eventually dispersed in Soviet Central Asia.

A year ago, a relatively unknown Argentine cardinal, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope. A few days later he announced he would take the name Francis, after Saint Francis of Assisi, because, he said, he had particular concern for the poor. In the 1880s, Pope Leo XIII also drew the attention of his clergy to St Francis’s teachings on poverty. The Spectator approved, and recommended it to Protestants as well as Catholics, but it took issue with the Pope’s argument that the spectacle of rich people joyfully embracing holy poverty would be enough to encourage the poor not to mind being poor.

When the idea of a modern Olympic Games began to be discussed, Spectator writers couldn’t really see the point. ‘Beyond a certain waste of money, there will be no harm in the new whim,’ the magazine ruled in 1894, but the notion that the competition would bind nations together didn’t seem very convincing: Why? Is it because they will all for a few days be recalling the Greeks and their achievements, and their short-lived superiority in all the arts? They cultivated of all Europe once studied Latin; but they cut one anothers' throats for all that with a singular unanimity of brutality.

Shirley Temple has died in California at the age of 85. She was known as America’s little darling after she appeared in her first film at the age of three. Later in life she moved into politics, running for Congress and joining the diplomatic corps. Henry Kissinger, she said, was surprised she knew where Ghana was, but she became ambassador to Ghana and later to Czechoslovakia.

Talking to Barbara Taylor about her new madness memoir this week, it’s clear that Britain does not have a glorious history when it comes to dealing with mad people. But The Spectator has always stood up for them, arguing in 1844, for example, that ‘the custody of lunatics ought to be like that of children – of sick children; and the guardians, who stand to those adult in body but infantile in mind in the place of parents, should be at all times open to their applications, ready to aid, comfort, and sooth.’ The magazine has often made a point of reporting on the horrors that have gone on behind closed doors. In the 19th century, it was frighteningly easy to get carted off to a loony bin. A visiting Frenchman had a terrible time of it in 1828.

The British government has said it will allow in some of Syria’s most vulnerable refugees. The Home Office hasn’t specified how many will be admitted but says it will probably be in the hundreds. The Syrian civil war has created 2.4 million refugees and 6.5 million internally displaced people, and looking through the archive, you get the sense that some of The Spectator’s former writers might have thought Britain could have offered more this time. The government’s attitude towards Jewish refugees in 1944 was ‘niggardly, bureaucratic, evasive and insincere’, according to the diplomat Harold Nicolson. We’ve historically been ‘proud to succour the oppressed and to defend the weak.

It’s a real pleasure looking through the first few editions of the Spectator from 1828, where the police reports and brief news items conjure up the England of Dickens and Trollope. There’s a man who comes before the court for throwing his wooden leg at people and is reprimanded by the judge. In a riotous atmosphere in court, the pauper explains that he can’t very well work with a leg that’s a foot and a half too short. Eventually, the Lord Mayor intercedes: ‘Defendant, I have prevailed upon the parish to put you once more upon your legs properly; and let me entreat you never to throw away an old leg until you get a new one."— (Loud laughing.

My brother’s Classics teacher Mr Maynard had a pet rock called Lithos (Greek for stone); his teaching methods included ‘subliminal learning’ sessions, during which he’d walk around the room conjugating verbs in a soft voice while everyone else suppressed giggles. He was also fond of a physical demonstration, hurling himself across the room with no warning when describing how Aegeus had thrown himself into the sea. As a result, most of his class at school chose Latin or Greek for A-level.

After Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, Douglas Murray wrote in the Spectator that he’d had 'a talent for making us, his readers, want to be better people. He used his abilities not to close down questions and ideas, but to open them up. In the process he made you, the reader, aware that you needed to do more, engage more, think more and know more. Writers often feel a need to impress their readers. Christopher made his readers want to impress the writer.' To nearly everything he wrote, Hitchens brought curiosity, indignation and analytical rigour and a vast frame of reference. It’s been a great pleasure looking through the recently digitised Spectator archive for Hitchens highlights.

Daniel Radcliffe is wearing the standard rehearsal outfit of T-shirt, black jeans and trainers. ‘Ah, this is for The Spectator. I probably shouldn’t have worn my fake Che Guevara T-shirt.’ It’s the classic Guevara image with a cartoon smiley face substituted. ‘I bought it because I’m so sick of people using him as a fashion icon.’ Radcliffe is 5ft 5in and his head looks slightly big on his body. But it’s the big pale blue eyes that you notice. Under dark, chaotic eyebrows, they give him an air of innocent frankness before he’s said anything. Being cast as Harry Potter aged 11 and spending his teenage years as the lead in the highest-grossing film franchise of all time could have turned his head, but Radcliffe is modest.

When my parents received a thank-you letter from a good friend recently, we all read it with (I’m afraid) not affectionate pleasure but a rising sense of indignation. The trouble with the letter was its extreme banality. It had been a lovely party, wrote the friend, the food delicious and the company great. The nerve, we all thought. He must think we’re mindless, to send us such a string of clichés. The writer must have felt a weight lift from his shoulders as he dropped his note into the postbox, but the truth was it would have been better had he never written at all. Platitudes by post are not worth the stamp. So why did he bother? Why do any of us bother any more?