Robin Ashenden is founder and ex-editor of the Central and Eastern European London Review. His detailed accounts of the media attacks on Lionel Shriver and Toby Young can be read on his substack ‘Letting the Child Run Riot’.
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Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, would have been 100 years old today, and she is one of history’s curios worth remembering. Born when Stalin was already installed as Lenin’s successor, and dying in 2011, well into the rule of Vladimir Putin – whom she referred to as an ‘awful former KGB-SPY’ – Alliluyeva, who defected
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The current Labour government, those ‘adults…back in the room,’ are now the UK’s unofficial Party of Sleaze. In the wake of lurid revelations about the Mandelson-Epstein love-in – not least that Mandy allegedly passed secret, prejudicial information to the late disgraced financier and may have been guilty of misconduct in office – Labour is under
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Going to Lublin in eastern Poland is a bit like visiting Pompeii. The city’s old town – compact, intricate, fetchingly tarnished – is as haunting as Krakow’s and more authentic than the reconstructed Warsaw. But something is missing, and you can feel it. Before the war, the Jewish population of Lublin stood at 43,000. Now, it
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If Kemi Badenoch needs a little relaxation from the ‘psychodrama’ of Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform, she could do a lot worse than watch Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 Elizabeth. The historical drama, about the plots and betrayals surrounding the early days of Elizabeth I’s reign, is uncannily reminiscent of recent events in her own party. With
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One of the origin stories about Kemi Badenoch’s career as politician is that, while waiting to be interviewed as candidate for Saffron Walden, she sat alone, listening through headphones to Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – that pounding, sinew-stiffening theme to Rocky III. Given the ups and downs of her year as leader – not
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The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost
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I’ve been a fan of Mariusz Szczygiel, the Polish author, investigative journalist and TV presenter, since reading his book Gottland: Mostly True Stories from Half of Czechoslovakia some ten years ago. Gottland – a series of 20th century Czech histories without the boring bits – was a knockout, winning the 2009 European Book Prize and
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Nearly everywhere you go in Nymburk, a small Bohemian town an hour or so from Prague, there are reminders of its most famous son, the novelist Bohumil Hrabal. The Czech writer, who died nearly 30 years ago, grew up here, amid the coopers and maltsters at the local Postřižinské brewery, where his stepfather was manager.
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Dame Jilly Cooper, who died today, finally achieved the acceptance that she’d always deserved. She wrote numerous volumes of witty, clear-sighted journalism, London-based romances like Prudence, Bella and Octavia – and, of course, her ‘Rutshire Chronicles’ series, set in the Cotswolds and featuring the wicked homme-fatale and aristo-sexbomb Rupert Campbell Black. They were books hoovered up
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Almost anywhere you go in Cardigan Bay – that bite out of West Wales which runs a hundred miles along the Irish Sea – the spirit of Dylan Thomas seems to go with you. The Swansea-born poet may only have lived in Cardiganshire intermittently, fleeing the bohemian bedlam of Fitzrovia during the second world war,
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‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds’ were the words theatre critic Kenneth Tynan had pinned above his desk. Perhaps no writer of our times followed those instructions more obediently than the late Brian Sewell, who died ten years ago today. Called by the Guardian ‘Britain’s most famous and controversial art critic’, Sewell, who wrote mainly for the Evening Standard,
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The recent commemorations surrounding the 150th anniversary of John Buchan’s birth – not least in The Spectator – have stirred up literary memories for me. Not of Buchan or his work particularly, I was a little too old for the glaring coincidences of The Thirty-Nine Steps when I read it in my twenties, but of
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The current Labour government grows ever more farcical. Despite its promise to ‘tread lightly’ on people’s lives, we’ve seen war declared on farmers, private schools, pubs, humour at work and even allotment owners. This week came the news that drivers over the age of 70 must take compulsory driving tests, with a mandatory ban if
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I may be the last person in the UK to have seen the 1999 film Human Traffic (rereleased last month). Justin Kerrigan’s inspired, low-budget comedy – which I watched this week – is about a group of clubbers and ecstasy-heads out for a night’s fun in Cardiff. Starring actors like John Simm, Shaun Parkes and
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For anyone born as I was, in the seventies, Edward Heath – who died 20 years ago this week – was a frequent presence in the news, and not always for the best of reasons. He was the silver-haired, curmudgeonly ex-prime minister nursing an implacable rage against his successor Margaret Thatcher, the cabinet colleague who’d
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One advantage to being born in the 1970s was the sheer abundance of good kids’ TV on offer. This was the golden age between clunky black and white offerings like Muffin the Mule, and the creeping vapidity of later shows like Teletubbies or The Care Bears. It gave us Camberwick Green, The Magic Roundabout, Captain
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Does anyone still talk about Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who died 30 years ago today? Though the Labour party often seems keen to forget a leader who won – almost uniquely – four out of five elections, he was, perhaps more than anyone, the prime minister who ushered in the modern age. When
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Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting
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To no one’s surprise, this week’s election results make miserable reading for the Tories, and the attacks on Kemi Badenoch have now begun. In an article in The Spectator, William Atkinson lambasts her as ‘an active barrier to the party’s saving itself,’ adding that she ‘had her chance to prove herself and has been found
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Right beside the airport I often use to fly home from Italy, there is a pod hotel where I am becoming a regular client. These, as most will know, are dirt-cheap places where sleep is stripped down to its absolute core. For about £35 a night here, you get a tiny berth of a room
