Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
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Grade: C+ I bought the ‘seminal’ Jethro Tull double album Thick as a Brick from a secondhand shop when I was nearing my 13th birthday. I played it once and then wrote off the £1.85 of my pocket money with buyer’s grave remorse. Sometimes, when the yearning for that much better decade, the 1970s,
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I must offer my support to Luke Main and Dr Joanna Brunker, who as a consequence of their fervent Christian beliefs refused to sell their house in Surrey to a gay couple. It shows a certain principle, no? I recently sold my house in Kent and being a Christian should really have made a similar
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An incalculable number of trees have been hewn down recently in order to provide paper for people writing lengthy, largely admiring books about the BBC. There have been at least five since Charlotte Higgins’s eloquent but slightly eccentric study This New Noise in 2018, including The War Against the BBC by Patrick Barwise and Peter
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What Keir Starmer should have said, but didn’t, was that he had indeed drunk some beer in a frowsy Labour party constituency office, but that he had not remotely enjoyed it. This would have had the advantage of being true, for a start: even through the blurred window you can see the Labour leader’s face
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People seem surprised and a little doubting that the Prime Minister is incapable of remembering if he attended a party in his own back garden in May 2020. It does not come as much of a shock to me, seeing as he has difficulty remembering how many children he has. Beneath that albino mop resides
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Grade: A I have persisted in buying everything Neil Young releases since I first heard On the Beach as a callow but pretentious 13-year-old. To tell you the truth, the past 27 years have somewhat tested this commitment. There has been a fatal laziness in the songwriting, lyrically and melodically, since 1994’s Sleeps with Angels
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People seem surprised and a little doubting that the Prime Minister is incapable of remembering if he attended a party in his own back garden in May 2020. It does not come as much of a shock to me, seeing as he has difficulty remembering how many children he has. Beneath that albino mop resides
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We are considering privatising or selling off our dog, Jessie. She seemed a rather wonderful idea when we got her nine years ago. But since then she has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical — she has three walks
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We’re closing the year by republishing our ten most popular articles in 2021. Here’s number one: Rod Liddle writing in March on Harry and Meghan. Caroline Rose Giuliani, the daughter of the former mayor of New York, Rudy, has been talking to the press about one of her hobbies. Apparently she likes nothing more than playing
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Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The dog thinks it deserves a walk in the filthy sleet. The kitchen is a tip and the bins need emptying. I have a headache, a runny nose and the ghost of a ticklish cough. Can
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My abiding memory of this fairly appalling year is of the face of the young student at Durham University who shouted ‘Disgusting!’ at me as I left the main college building. This followed a very short speech I’d given to about 250 students but which, I suspect, he hadn’t heard because he’d probably walked out
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I have been reading 39 Ways To Save The Planet by the BBC journalist Tom Heap, which includes such ingenious suggestions as capturing refrigerant gases in a large box and then destroying the large box. It is an interesting book. I would like to suggest to Tom a 40th way in which we might help
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41 min listen
In this week’s episode: Is the current NHS crisis a bug or a feature? In the Spectator’s cover story this week, our economics editor Kate Andrews writes about the state of the NHS and why even though reform is so clearly needed it’s nearly politically impossible to try to do so. She joins the podcast
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No sooner had an inch or two of snow fallen on our upland areas last week than the climate-change Morlocks were out on social media, shrieking and bed-wetting themselves into a catatonic stupor. Nurse, nurse, bring the meds, quickly. ‘There! Told you!’ was the general gist. If it is snowing there cannot possibly be global
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Grade: C The problem I have is that I thought she was pretty awful before — when she was just fat and from Tottenham. Now that she has been marinated in SoCal for six years, she seems to have become even worse: a kind of Meghan Markle with a larynx. It was cheap schlock all
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A Church of England primary school in Richmond, London, has junked Sir Winston Churchill and J.K. Rowling as names for two of its houses and replaced them with the names of the footballer Marcus Rashford and the lady who helped out in the Crimean war, Mary Seacole. This was done, the school said, in order
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Exciting news from Durham University, which is helping its students to become ‘sex workers’. This noble institution is offering two courses in the various forms of harlotry. My only concern is that at present they do not actually offer an academic qualification in these subjects — at the very least an undergraduate degree in, say,
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Grade: B+ Everything these days devolves to prog — and not always very good prog. Where once synths were vastly expensive, difficult to master and hell to maintain they are now in a place beyond ubiquity; every sound you want conjured by the press of a key, your song suddenly washed over with sonics that
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I was intrigued to learn that Kamala Harris, the Vice President of the US, is worried about racist trees. I have always held trees in the deepest suspicion: it is their long-abiding silences which worry me. As we know from Black Lives Matter, ‘Silence is violence’ — and trees, for literally aeons, have been conspicuously
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I assume that somewhere on the guided ‘Piers and Queers’ walking tour of Brighton, the participants are enjoined to regard, in awe, the Dome — the venue at which Abba, on 6 April 1974, won the Eurovision Song Contest, thus both launching themselves as a wildly successful band and establishing the town (as it was
