Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
Grade: B– One of the things not to like about Vampire Weekend, other than their cloying preppiness, Ezra Koenig’s ingratiating voice, the bizarre cultural appropriation that never gets called out and the Upper West Side archness of the lyrics, is the fact they rarely put more than two decent songs on an album. That’s true
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The former BBC presenter Gavin Esler has very kindly given us an insight into how BBC people think (had we been in much doubt). Esler, who is now standing for election as a member of the hilarious Change UK party, said the following: ‘TV news must stop giving airtime to the “village idiots” of Brexit
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It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees.
From our UK edition
Grade: A Old skag head’s back, then — older (40 now!), probably none the wiser, still a very good songwriter. This may be the best thing he’s ever done, at least since those incendiary first moments of the Libertines. Yeah, I can do without the affected drawl skittering this way and that around the melody
From our UK edition
Overheard on the eastbound Jubilee Line train today at about 1620. Two blokes, sitting next to each other, apparently friends. One of them takes out an apple and starts eating it. The other one looks at him and says: ‘What are you doing?’ His friend continues eating the apple. ‘Are you having a crafty apple?
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The carnage in Sri Lanka which left more than 300 dead may have been carried out by ‘Buddhists’, according to the BBC Today presenter Nick Robinson on the morning after those hideous bombings. We all grope slowly towards meaning, don’t we? We look for precedent, we search for clues. I did both when I heard
From our UK edition
I had mixed feelings about the sacking of Roger Scruton from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, following comments he made to the New Statesman. On the one hand it was utterly shameful and gutless on the part of the government, although no worse than one has come to expect from members of a
From our UK edition
Every year during Easter Week I draw up a chart of my least favourite countries and distribute the list to close friends and relatives. I’ve been doing this for thirty years now and I’m sure it has proved helpful to those close to me. So sure, in fact, that I intend, from now on, to
From our UK edition
I had mixed feelings about the sacking of Roger Scruton from the government’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, following comments he made to the New Statesman. On the one hand it was utterly shameful and gutless on the part of the government, although no worse than one has come to expect from members of a
From our UK edition
It is a great disappointment to me that my phrases don’t get picked up by other writers and then society in general before ending up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chuck Palahniuk is credited with the use of ‘snowflake’ as a pejorative term, for example, and James Bartholomew claims (despite some evidence to the contrary)
From our UK edition
Grade: A– If your 12-year-old daughter’s a bit thick, she probably likes Ariana Grande. Come on, dads — you’ve got to face up to this stuff, you’ve got to JUDGE. Be ruthless. If, however, she’s a bit smarter, but also sullen, lazy and probably prone to self-harming, she’ll be a big Billie Eilish fan. Only
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Titania McGrath is the alter ego of the schoolteacher Andrew Doyle. A perpetually enraged ‘activist, healer and radical intersectional poet’, her job was to lampoon the imbecilities of the achingly ‘woke’ middle class left, and expose the manifest contradictions in what they were spouting. Her forum for this was, of course, that vast lagoon of
From our UK edition
Who is your favourite brave Remainer Conservative MP? Anna Soubry has to be near the top of the list, for having remarked before the referendum: ‘We are trusting the British people. We will go to the people, and let the people decide whether or not to stay within the EU.’ And then at about lunchtime
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You can buy the latest edition of Thomas Erskine May’s Parliamentary Practice for just over three hundred quid, but I wouldn’t advise it. Short on jokes, in my opinion. A product of its time, fastidious early Victoriana striving desperately for the coming paradigm: scientism. Old Erskine was possibly the bastard offspring of one of our
From our UK edition
I was down the pub with my wife last week, out in the tiny smoking section, when a woman with a glass of beer sat down beside us and opened a conversation. She was from Delhi, she told us, before announcing somewhat grandly that she was an ‘academic’. I suppose I should have got the
From our UK edition
Amongst the wrath we should pour upon our elected politicians – yes, especially the Tory Remainers and Labour’s bereft and shameless MPs – let’s keep some in reserve for the stoic, hardline, Brexiteers, huh? I’m with them: no deal is better than her deal. I agree. But – and this is the argument I’ve been
From our UK edition
And that, my lovely friends, is it for Brexit. You kippers and ERGers who think we’ll leave with no deal, are deluded. They will not let it happen. They were never going to let it happen. Brexit has been killed by a Parliament which by a two-to-one majority never wanted it, despite what lip service
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A good decade or so ago I wrote a fairly vituperative article in response to a piece by the writer James Bartholomew in this magazine, who had announced that he intended to home-school his daughter Alex, aged nine. James had explained in great detail how he would inculcate his charge in the liberal arts: ‘I
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Grade:A Royal Trux are back — kind of. Singer (if that’s what you want to call what she does) Jennifer Herrema is ankle tagged for some misdemeanour, almost certainly involving narcotics, so may not show up at some gigs to promote the new album. And her partner and ex-husband Neil Hagerty has washed his hands
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Congratulations to Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood for sweeping all before them in the Connecticut girls’ high school track races last week. Yes, of course they are men. There were some anguished complaints from the various girls these two speedy lads defeated, but these were of course brushed aside in a country where women’s sporting
