The Spectator

The Spectator at war: Censorship and mystification

From our UK edition

From The Policy of Mystification, The Spectator, 5 December 1914: Let us say that we have not ourselves suffered from the Censorship at all. We have never submitted, and have never been asked to submit, any article to the Press Bureau. Such censorship as has been exercised in our columns has been the purely voluntary censorship which is exercised at all times, whether in war or in peace, by every editor who has any sense of public duty, and that remark, we believe, applies to the whole British Press, daily and weekly.

The Spectator at war: Military timetables

From our UK edition

From News of the Week, The Spectator, 5 December 1914: Friday's Times contains extracts from an interview with Lord Kitchener, published in the Saturday Evening Post— a weekly newspaper with a large circulation in all parts of the United States. Nothing could be better than the passage in which Lord Kitchener dealt with the action of the Germans in Belgium :— "War has its ethics; but if ever a soldier is to become judge of the behaviour of the civil population of a hostile country, if he is to be not only judge and jury, but the inflicter of punishment, why, then, to my conception, he loses his proper ordained functions as soldier and becomes executioner.

Spectator letters: All Things Bright and Beautiful, oligarchs and school fees, and Songs of Praise

From our UK edition

Times past Sir: ‘Imagine,’ says Hugo Rifkind in his excellent piece on the power of Google (29 November), ‘that there was one newspaper that got all the scoops. Literally all of them.’ We don’t have to imagine: such a newspaper existed, a couple of centuries ago, and Hugo works for its descendent. The Times of the early 19th century had a foreign intelligence service that regularly outperformed Whitehall’s, and a circulation several times that of all its rivals combined. It thundered as confidently on royal scandal as it did on the details of parliamentary reform. Its editor dictated the membership of at least one cabinet. Regulation just entrenched this state of affairs.

When a cricket ball cost Britain an heir to the throne

From our UK edition

A fatal shot The sad death of Australian batsman Philip Hughes was a reminder that a cricket ball can kill. A blow on the cricket field may even have cost us an heir to the throne. — One of the earliest suspected victims was Frederick, Prince of Wales, the son of George II, who is first recorded as having played cricket in 1733 when he put up a team against Sir William Gage, in a match played on Mouley Hurst, Surrey. — In 1751, a few weeks after his 44th birthday, he was said to be suffering from an abscess in the chest caused by a blow by a cricket ball, or possibly a real tennis ball. He then caught a chill and developed pleurisy. He died on 31 March after the abscess burst.