Nettle tea; cannon-ball bread; potatoes, potatoes, potatoes; eggs, eggs, eggs. Months of vegetarianism followed by the slaughter of the prize calf. Could you be self-sufficient for a year? Plus excellent terry walton. My column The Spectator
spectator.co.uk/article/how-to… Spectator Culture

Taylor Swift is closer to a phenomenally successful film franchise or a hit Netflix series than a musical artist. She is a brand, and the brand logo is a broken heart

spectator.co.uk/article/taylor…

Only just seen this. Another wonderful tribute.

Intelligent and beautiful, Celia and Mamaine Paget were loved by some of the greatest writers of the interwar years, but remained uniquely devoted to each other

spectator.co.uk/article/the-id…

Sorry to go on about this but with the latest edition of the Venice Biennale and its complete abdication of aesthetic interest, contemporary art is over. Long live contemporary art?

Me in The Spectator Spectator Culture
spectator.co.uk/article/the-la…

‘I had no job, money. I was going down the local Odeon to nick loo roll. I recall lying flat down on the floor wanting to cry, then laughing hysterically at the absurdity of being totally stuffed at that young age. So I got up & started writing Withnail’

spectator.co.uk/article/i-coul…

A new anthropological type is emerging, says Pascal Bruckner – the shrivelled, hyperconnected being who no longer needs others or the outside world

spectator.co.uk/article/are-we…

A teacher like Michael Tanner would never survive in today’s university climate

spectator.co.uk/article/a-teac…

Vera Holme and Evelina Haverfield, lovers and fellow suffragettes, risked their lives as nursing staff in the first world war and exposed the absurdity of Edwardian homophobia

spectator.co.uk/article/they-f…

Danny Dyer's new programme is a deeply odd mix of the touching, the illuminating, the silly, the thought-provoking, the cheerfully comic, the pensive and the completely confusing

spectator.co.uk/article/danny-…

Daisy Ridley is excellent as drab Fran in the film Sometimes I Think About Dying – but it's yet another example of a beautiful woman pretending she's not

spectator.co.uk/article/learni…

Adam Smyth, too, is a book-maker – doubly qualified to write this sparklingly learned book. I cannot recommend it highly enough

spectator.co.uk/article/being-…

Those who imagine ‘Shakespearean comedy’ to be an oxymoron will be pleasantly surprised. This show is full of laughs as rich and ample as Falstaff’s belly

spectator.co.uk/article/player…

Two nights before the reading, Rushdie dreamt he was attacked by a man with a spear in a Roman amphitheatre

spectator.co.uk/article/to-sal…

Richard Bratby and Gerard McBurney explain what made Michael Tanner such a great critic and teacher

spectator.co.uk/article/we-hav…

Karl Hyde has the look these days of Julius Caesar in a BBC4 historical reconstruction. His partner Rick Smith was plonked on a podium behind a stack of technology so vast it could probably have sent something into space: Underworld, at Usher Hall, review

spectator.co.uk/article/the-ma…

The seaborne invasion went so smoothly, it might have been thought plain-sailing. But that was far from the truth. Nick Hewitt describes the meticulous forethought that preceded it

spectator.co.uk/article/eighty…

The new Amy Winehouse biopic captures the self-destructiveness that the fans are always trying to lay at someone else's door

spectator.co.uk/article/better…

The Edwardian roots of noise music

spectator.co.uk/article/in-def…

‘What drew me to my partner Andrew…’ is not what I expected to read in a book about physics. I can’t remember reading, say, The Selfish Gene and thinking: ‘I wonder how Richard met his wife.’ But such is the fashion

spectator.co.uk/article/are-we…