Paul Wood was a BBC foreign correspondent for 25 years, in Belgrade, Athens, Cairo, Jerusalem, Kabul and Washington DC. He has won numerous awards, including two US Emmys for his coverage of the Syrian civil war
One night in 1909, in Peterborough, a police constable named Kettle looked up and saw ‘a strange cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’. This was the start of the great Zeppelin panic that preceded the first world war. There were dozens of sightings, newspaper editorials, and questions in parliament, but it was all a fantasy: not
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Angus Colwell ponders why young Brits seem to aspire to be more Australian; Paul Wood analyses the daring plan to reclaim the Chagos islands; Andrew Rule explains why to read is to love; and finally, Jonathan Meades declares that John Vanbrugh defies taxonomy as events kick off to mark the 300th anniversary
Peros Banhos on the Chagos archipelago looks like your basic tropical island paradise: turquoise waters and golden sands, waves lapping on a palm-fringed beach. But step off the strip of sand into the wall of green behind, and you’re enveloped by mosquitoes. The old well you were counting on for water is a shallow puddle.
Donald Trump has probably not read Machiavelli, even the short one, The Prince. Machiavelli’s most famous advice was that it’s better for a prince to be feared than loved. But above all, he said, a ruler should strive not to be hated. Nobody likes a bully. The US President, however, clearly doesn’t care about any
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On New Year’s Eve a few years ago, I was in Medellín, Colombia, the city that gave its name to one of the world’s most notorious drugs cartels. Our taxi driver offered us some cocaine to fuel the party we were heading to: $10 for a gram; $15 for the “luxury” product. Our group decided
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In 1998, the conservative intellectual and moralist Bill Bennett published a book, The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. Bennett had to rush the book out after “I did not have sexual relations with that woman” changed to: “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.”
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The former head of Blackwater is becoming a prominent MAGA voice
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The documentary claims the Saudis were behind 9/11 – and the CIA then protected them
During an earlier Gaza war, I spoke to families who had fled the fighting but whose place of refuge – a UN school – had been hit by white phosphorus. We stood around and looked at what remained of one of the shells… the bits were still smoking and would burst into flames if you
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‘My best guess is that someone born today has a better chance of dying by AI than of graduating high school’
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Freddy Gray speaks to Spectator writer Paul Wood about his piece this the latest edition of Spectator World on AI and whether it will soon have rights. This first came about when Paul went to live in Rome and discovered some of the work the Vatican has been doing in AI.
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Some scientists believe they might be creating life
Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held as sabaya, or sex slaves. After the Assad dictatorship fell, amid revenge attacks by militias loyal to the country’s new rulers, there were reports of abductions for rape and even of forced marriage. Alawite human
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Michael Gove interviews Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood (1:17; Max Jeffery shadows the police as they search for the parents of three abandoned babies (14:41); Paul Wood asks if this is really the end of the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (20:57); Susannah Jowitt reports that death has come to the
All wars end, one way or another. One of the longest wars in the Middle East, between Turkey and Kurdish separatists, may finally be over. After 40 years of bitter struggle, the Kurdistan Workers’ party, the PKK, has declared that it will disarm and disband. It’s an achievement, of a sort, for the PKK’s imprisoned
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Something odd seems to have been happening on at least one online gambling platform
Assisi In a medieval church built of white stone, pilgrims and tourists shuffle past the body of a 15-year-old boy in a tomb with a glass side. The boy is handsome, with dark curly hair, and wears a blue tracksuit top, jeans and Nike trainers. Everyone peers through the glass and some realise, with a
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On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Would Trump really bomb Iran, asks Paul Wood (1:38); Katy Balls interviews Health Secretary Wes Streeting on NHS reform, Blairism and Game of Thrones (8:38); Olivia Potts examines the history – and decline – of the Easter staple, roast lamb (18:25); the explorer Benedict Allen says Erling Kagge and Neil
A satellite picture shows six American B-2 Stealth bombers parked on the runway at Diego Garcia. The planes – each with a distinctive flying-wing shape, like a bat – are sinister, otherworldly, and seem like a portent. Surely that’s the idea. Donald Trump has warned the Iranian leadership there ‘will be bombing the likes of
In 2011, the Hampstead theatre put on an autobiographical play about a marriage strained by lies, betrayal and, as the exasperated wife says, the presence of ‘three of us’ in the relationship. The play was Loyalty by the journalist Sarah Helm, the third person was Tony Blair and the principal male character was a barely
