2012 is done. Here is the final selection (published in the magazine last month) of the Spectator’s best books of the year. Happy 2013. Susan Hill Spitalfields Life by The Gentle Author (Saltyard Books, £20). The writer started a daily blog about his life in Spitalfields — people, jobs, buildings, street life, monuments. A whole
Tristram Hunt paints a bleak picture of the state the Palace of Westminster is in for Spectator readers this week as he draws parallels between the crumbling parliament building in New Delhi and plans to renovate the Mother of Parliaments in London. The Labour MP and historian writes: In SW1, the situation is critical. Forget
‘I tumbled down a hill.’
Alice in Poundland
‘Ah, his first word.’
‘A wheel? You’ll be needing this...’
‘My train set was broken by Boxing Day.’
‘I need more sky to blot out’
‘We’ve been stripped of our double “A” status.’
‘Thank goodness they’re going to stop the spread of wind turbines over the countryside.’
Distinguished Wardens Sir: Contrary to Dennis Sewell’s statement (‘Assault on the Ivory Tower’, 15/22 December), Wadham College did not ‘elect’ John Wilkins to be Warden in 1647 after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. Rather, Parliamentary Commissioners sacked the royalist Warden and almost all the Fellows and Scholars and imposed Wilkins as the new Warden,
Counting the years 2013 might look an uninteresting number for a year but it is in fact a mathematical rarity: a year whose digits, when rearranged, can form a simple arithmetic progression: i.e. 0,1,2,3. — The last such year was 1432. The next will be 2031, after which we will have to wait until 2103
Home Banks should erect a protective ring-fence round their high-street operations, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards recommended, and moreover it should be ‘electrified’. The metaphor meant that regulators should have the power to break up banks that misbehaved. The ten members of the commission included the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Revd Justin Welby, and
To attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve in parts of Nigeria is to take your life in your hands. For the last three years, Islamist militants have been attacking churches but last week, when gunmen moved on a church in Potiskum, they found the military waiting. On their retreat, they came across a smaller unprotected
In this week’s issue of The Spectator, Melissa Kite joins David Cameron’s local hunt, the Heythrop, to find out what its members think of its recent drubbing in the courts from the RSPCA, and the Conservative Party’s troubled relationship with fox hunting. She meets former huntsman Julian Barnfield, who was fined £1,000 in the case,
