The Spectator

Podcast: Britain’s jihad, the Pope vs the Vatican, and the existence of ‘The One’

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[audioplayer src=”http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_21_August_2014_v4.mp3″ title=”Britain’s jihad, the Pope vs the Vatican, and the existence of ‘The One'” fullwidth=”yes”] The View from 22 podcast [/audioplayer]The murder of James Foley by an Isis fighter ‘with a London accent’ has been treated with understandable revulsion. But we shouldn’t be surprised, says Douglas Murray in his cover piece this week. On

The Spectator at war: The death of Pope Pius X

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From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Pope Pius X. died at twenty minutes past one on Thursday morning. In a moment of lucidity, just before his death, his Holiness is reported to have said: “Now I begin to think the end is approaching. The Almighty in His in- exhaustible goodness wishes to spare me the

The death of Pope Pius X

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From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Pope Pius X died at 20 minutes past one on Thursday morning. In a moment of lucidity, just before his death, his Holiness is reported to have said: ‘Now I begin to think the end is approaching. The Almighty in His inexhaustible goodness wishes to spare

The Spectator at war: Commercial possibilities

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From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: IT is gratifying to find that the public is rapidly waking up to the fact that other prospects than those of universal unemployment arise out of the present war. The daily papers of this week, instead of talking of the necessity for relief funds, have begun to talk of

The Spectator at war: How to keep husbands sweet

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From The Spectator, 22 August 1914: SIR,—The article on this subject in your last issue has prompted me to write down some of the things said to me about the war by the women in my district. Our rector wished me to ask at each house whether any one from it was serving with the

Video: Does Cameron have an Iraq policy? Or is he just making it up?

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The Prime Minister has returned from his holidays, and yesterday wrote an intriguing piece in the Sunday Telegraph about the ongoing struggles in Iraq and Syria. ‘True security will only be achieved if we use all our resources – aid, diplomacy, our military prowess – to help bring about a more stable world’ he wrote, and

The Spectator at war: Lord Kitchener’s campaign

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The Spectator, 22 August 1914: Recruiting for Lord Kitchener’s first hundred thousand men appears to have brought in seventy thousand. That is good, though, we confess, not so rapid as we should like to see it. This comparative slowness is, no doubt, very largely ‘due to the fact that even now there are not enough

The Spectator at war: Talk of the village

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‘War and the village wives’, from The Spectator, 15 August 1914: The men and women of the village are talking unceasingly about the war. The whole aspect of the place is changed. The English silence is broken. Even on Sunday no one lolls and smokes in speechless reflection. All the men read the newspapers; none

The Spectator at war: The German military mind

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From ‘The German military mind’, The Spectator, 15 August 1914: All Englishmen are now agreed that Germany made the war, and that the moving force within the German nation was and is German militarism. The astonishing thing is in looking back is that any one here should have doubted what would happen if we either

Are ministers better off today?

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From the Barometer in this week’s Spectator. Home Office minister Mark Simmonds resigned this week, complaining he couldn’t afford to live in London on his junior minister’s salary of £89,435. His resignation echoes that of Lord Gowrie, who resigned as minister for the arts in September 1985 complaining he couldn’t live in London on £33,000

The Spectator at war: A well-behaved press

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‘War and the press’, from The Spectator, 15 August 1914: When Mr Churchill paid a high compliment in the House of Commons to the British newspapers he said no more than was deserved. The newspapers are now under control by law, and we need not specially praise them for a reticence and a public spirit

Surgeon

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‘Please, relax — I’m a very qualified surgeon and Mr and Mrs Piggy have yet to make a mistake.’