Table of contents for 18 April 2026 in The Spectator

When Britons go to the polls next month, the results will likely reveal just how un-United the Kingdom has become. Separatist parties are poised to win in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The established parties of government – Labour and Conservative – are likely to sustain losses. The former may be deserved, and the latter unjust, given Kemi Badenoch has been vigorously effective in holding the Prime Minister to account. Even so, the polarising dynamics of our splintered nation will hit both historic parties hard. In a polity that is split by geography, attitude and income, one division is particularly striking: age. Intergenerational tensions are one of Britain’s most salient divisions. A YouGov poll following the Gorton and Denton by-election found almost half of 18-to 24-year-olds back Zack Polanski’s Greens…

On Tuesday, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport approved the sale of my employers, the Telegraph Group, to Axel Springer. Three years of hiatus are almost at an end. Numerous candidates – some good, most bad – came forward but, until now, none succeeded in navigating the pitfalls. We escaped the toils of the Barclays’ debts, the threat of foreign state ownership and private equity, the danger of Chinese influence and much more. As a semi-spectator of proceedings, I have been profoundly impressed by the sangfroid of our editor, Chris Evans, and his team as they have ridden storm after storm. And now we are to be owned by Germans. If that possibility had even been raised in the last century, there would have been outcry (imagine the reaction…

The bombing of the Revolutionary government in Iran is drawing comparisons with the war in Iraq. But the comparisons are with the wrong war. In 1981 there was an attack on Iraq which much more closely resembles what Donald Trump is trying to achieve in Iran. The story goes back to 1976, when the government of Jacques Chirac in France sold a nuclear reactor to the Iraqis – a deal for which the French have always managed to avoid much criticism. The French charged the Iraqi government twice the going rate. But as one of the Iraqi nuclear team later recalled: ‘We were happy to pay. After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?’ Who indeed. Once Saddam Hussein was in power, he poured resources into…

The 17.48 from Paddington does not, on first sight, seem exceptional. Over-hard seats, over-bright lights and a scrum at the ticket barriers: none of these is special. The modern Hitachi trains are solid but dull. Only Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s great arching iron roof adds splendour to the scene. But pause by coach L on the daily London to Carmarthen express and you might notice a small miracle. This train is one of the very last in Britain to carry a proper dining car. To its immense credit, GWR, the route’s operator, cooks and serves decent meals on six services a day: three at lunchtime and three in the evening, on its lines from London to Wales and the West Country. Tables are laid ready for three courses, glassware clinks, there’s…

Midway through James Joyce’s Ulysses, the character J.J. O’Molloy tips his hat to ‘Our watchful friend, the Skibbereen Eagle’, a playful reference to an obscure provincial newspaper in the west of Ireland. Under an ambitious new editor, the Skibbereen Eagle had risen fleetingly to prominence in 1898 for its robust response to Tsar Nicholas II’s attempts to gain a warm-water port for the Russian navy by encroaching on China’s Yellow Sea. As its editorial warned in a chiding tone, the Eagle would ‘keep its eye on the Emperor of Russia and all such despotic enemies – whether at home or abroad – of human progression and man’s natural rights’. The Tsar, so the joke went, must have been quaking in his boots at the steely glare trained upon him from…

What with headlines focused on the Strait of Hormuz and scare stories about out-of-control AI, forecasts of a storm in the less vivid field of ‘private credit’ have dropped down the news agenda. But thunder continues to rumble since the collapse in London of the short-term property lender Market Financial Solutions, now being investigated for fraud – and there are connections between private credit, Iran and AI that could turn a storm into a hurricane. Governor Andrew Bailey of the Bank of England first talked of ‘alarm bells’ in the US private credit sector last October. The latest indicator is a stampede of investor withdrawals from Blue Owl, a prominent New York private lender. Now comes a warning from JP Morgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon – though apparently ‘not worried’…

My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: A Fiction by Deborah LevyHamish Hamilton, £18.99, pp. 208 In a 2013 interview, Deborah Levy said: ‘Modernism is the soft typewriter of the womb that made me.’ But what made Modernism? My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein is Levy’s attempt to answer the question. In this novel, an unnamed narrator from London moves to Paris to write an ‘essay’ on Stein, the American patron of the avant-garde. There she meets Eva, an enigmatic illustrator whose blue eyes make everyone go ‘Awww’, and Fanny, a fashionable finance consultant with a thriving sex life. As the three search for Eva’s missing cat (originally called It and renamed Bob by Fanny), the narrator chases after Stein’s many trails but struggles to bring her into focus.…

The Last Movement by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte CollinsCanongate, £9.99, pp. 128 Robert Seethaler is known for celebrating the unsung: commonplace characters – peasants, labourers or shop assistants – who draw us into their quiet lives. But the protagonist in The Last Movement is a celebrated historical figure: Gustav Mahler. For those in search of biographical information, as W.H. Auden put it, a shilling life will give you all the facts. Today we’d go online. How will Seethaler, a distinguished miniaturist, deal with an icon? We meet the composer in 1911 aboard the SS Amerika on his final journey across the Atlantic, homebound and dying. A respectful ship’s boy brings him a tray of tea as he sits on the sundeck, wrapped in a blanket, contemplating the ocean and his…

The Renoir Girls: A Hidden History of Art, War and Betrayal by Catherine OstlerSimon & Schuster, £30, pp. 464 Shimmering off the cover of The Renoir Girls are sisters Alice (aged four) and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers (six), portrayed in all the promise and innocence of a pampered childhood by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Aged 40, Renoir was then the coming portrait painter for the gratin of Paris, as he struggled to make ends meet with smart commissions from wealthy sponsors – a network of Catholic and Jewish banking families that included the Ephrussis (memorialised by Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), Camondos, Rothschilds and Cahen d’Anvers. The gulf could hardly have been wider between the painter’s rough-hewn artisan origins and his moneyed, leisured patrons, immortalised by Proust, a frequent…

Belle and SebastianRoyal Albert Hall Cosmic PsychosThe Dome Do Belle and Sebastian have the most polite audience in pop? Normally when a pop singer leaves the stage to promenade through the audience, they are besieged. Even in seated venues most stars will make sure to take a security guard with them. I once saw bouncers drag women in red dresses away from Chris de Burgh at the Royal Albert Hall. Not with Belle and Sebastian. When Stuart Murdoch stepped off the stage, barely anyone even stood up. One chap had a little dance with him but no one reached out for a touch of his hand. He climbed from the arena floor to the stalls that circle it, and made his way into a row, where everyone swivelled their seats…

The plumber was shouting hysterically at me down the phone because I had asked him to install a heated towel rail. ‘Towel rail? Towel rail! Armageddon is coming! Did you fill your oil tank up? It’s tripling in price by Christmas! I’ve got 40 jobs piled up! Forty jobs!’ ‘So are you saying I can’t have a heated towel rail?’ I said. I know the plumber only too well. Many a time he has sat at my kitchen table chain-smoking while rambling about the devil, and how the world is coming to an end. If that is his default setting, you can imagine how he reacts to things going very badly on a global scale. He lives on his nerves at the best of times. Major world events are apt…

More than 3,500 players convened in Karlsruhe, Germany over the Easter weekend to take part in the Grenke Chess Festival. The flagship event was the Freestyle Chess Open, and Magnus Carlsen’s advocacy for Freestyle chess (also known as Fischer-Random, or Chess960), in which the pieces on the back rank are rearranged randomly at the start of the game, has given a huge boost to the popularity of this variant. His 9/9 winning score last year was astonishing even by Carlsen’s standards, but this time he had to settle for shared third place on 7/9, alongside other elite players including Nepomniachtchi and Abdusattorov. Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and Germany’s top player Vincent Keymer both finished ahead on 7.5/9, with the latter taking the title on tiebreak. Keymer could be thankful for a lucky…

Maugham’s prosecutorial zeal is boundless – he’s the Torquemada of Wokus Dei I was leaving the CNN presidential election night party at dawn in 2016, having celebrated Donald Trump’s victory, when Paul Staines, then the editor of Guido Fawkes, turned to me and asked: ‘Are we the baddies?’ This was a reference to a Mitchell and Webb sketch set during the second world war in which the question is asked by one Nazi of another. I assured him we were not, but it was a genuine moment of self-reflection on Paul’s part, not a joke. I don’t suppose Jolyon Maugham KC has ever been afflicted by such doubts, even after bludgeoning a fox to death with a baseball bat in 2019. Scarcely a week passes without the social justice warrior…

Last week our cookery writer Olivia Potts scooped the world by revealing that AB World Foods was to cease production of Gentleman’s Relish – on the eve of the 200th anniversary of the anchovy paste first gracing our dinner tables. For The Spectator, itself approaching its 200th anniversary, this was a loss that could scarcely be borne. But, thanks to quiet diplomacy between this magazine and the owners of Gentleman’s Relish, negotiations are now advancing to secure the future of Patum Peperium. More details will follow, but in the meantime, the chairman of Associated British Foods has released one of the last existing consignments of Gentleman’s Relish to The Spectator. We will outline plans for the distribution of this emergency supply next week.…

Elizabeth II was never particularly enthusiastic about birthdays. They were a good excuse for a parade or an honours list, but not a patch on a major wedding anniversary, let alone a jubilee. Those were a celebration of true dedication, not of mere longevity. Even so, were she still with us, the late Queen would have acknowledged that her centenary on Tuesday is a big deal. It would also have created a delightful conundrum for the Buckingham Palace anniversaries office, the department that sends out 100th-birthday congratulations from the sovereign. At the start of her reign, she was sending 385 of those each year across all her realms (by telegram). By the end, it was over 16,000 (by card). When her own mother reached 100 in the summer of 2000,…

Last month, a new account called London Price Drop appeared on X. It has already gained more than 14,000 followers simply by posting screenshots from Rightmove, which illustrate how properties in the capital are falling sharply in value. One of these is a leasehold flat in Shepherd’s Bush purchased for £425,000 in 2017, before being re-listed for £395,000 in May 2024, and eventually sold for £325,000 last August. Adjusted for inflation, that represents a real terms loss of close to £250,000. The London Price Drop account is so popular because it contradicts an assumption that many in Britain hold dear. Young or old, owner or renter, almost all of us believe that buying property is the route to wealth, and that house prices, in the long run, always go up.…

It was a matter of some disappointment to me that Kanye West was barred entry to this country as a person not conducive to the public good. Millions of people have arrived here in the past 20 years and, unlike Kanye, have no intention of leaving. I am not sure what proportion of them are ‘conducive to the public good’. As a kind of fascistic Little Englander, I would hazard a guess at about 8 per cent, so quite why we singled out Kanye I am not sure. Of course, he courted a little controversy with his exciting song ‘Heil Hitler’. Kanye also divested himself of some anti-Semitic observations via technology’s equivalent of rap music, Twitter. But if we are banning people from the UK because they are anti-Semitic then…

Hero worship Peter Magyar, the new PM of Hungary, has the unique distinction among world leaders of bearing the name of the country he leads. Why do we call the country Hungary when the natives call it the ‘land of the Magyars’? – ‘Hungary’ is literally, the land of the Huns. However, Middle English didn’t distinguish between them and the Magyars, a tribe which, in the 9th century, invaded and settled in what had been known as Pannonia. The Magyars themselves spoke a Uralic language related to Finnish, in which ‘Magyar’ is believed to mean ‘hero man’. Any relationship to the acronym ‘MAGA’ is purely coincidental. School starters In the tank Where are the most expensive, and cheapest, countries to fill your car with diesel? (In the equivalent of US$…

When war is in the air, young men traditionally sign up – and they traditionally sign up, disproportionately, from the north-east of England, where I grew up. The country must be prepared for war, says Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, head of our armed forces. But what use is all this puffed-up talk of a battle-ready Britain if we have no soldiers? In the north-east, the supply of soldiers has slowed not just to a trickle but to a drip. Sunderland, for instance, home to nearly 11,000 veterans, sent just ten men into the army last year. A reporter called Fred Sculthorp went to Sunderland for Dispatch magazine last month, to work out what had happened to the north-east’s fighting spirit, but all Fred found was apathy: why sign…

Her end of terrace up for saleI lift old photos off the wall,leave three sun-faded patches whereno face looks down to judge or carewhich dresses, blouses, skirts I dropin bin bags for the hospice shopor, delicately cavalier,sort lipsticks, powders, underwear,chuck peep-toes, slingbacks then throw inhigh heels for shoebank, boots for bin,until, boxed up, price-tagged, risqué,I find, unopened, tucked away,sheer stockings, slips, pink camisole,a Charvet scarf, Kashmiri stole,knocked off, long hidden in this drawerillicitly still waiting forthat starry night, that final flingtime larcenously failed to bring. I lift them from the dark again,blow dust from card and cellophanewhere, love come early, love come late,desire and passion hibernatein nylon, ribbon, clouds of softblue tissue laid against the mothas, shadeless, naked bulbs expose,caught in the act, up on its toesand shoeless now, her…

It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar with Paris did I claim to be that, in 2023, I was contacted by an agency in need of someone who could conduct specialised ‘art tours’ for small groups of foreigners. Most of these clients were Americans, largely from the Midwest, but there was also a number of well-to-do Chinese and the odd Indian. They wanted much the same thing: they’d seen the Eiffel Tower and been ripped off on the Left Bank; they’d eaten at Lipp and some had even bussed out to grottier banlieues to get a real-life taste of La Haine. What they really wanted, however, was someone to hold their hand around the museums. They paid…

Birmingham Contemporary Music Group/Cockerham/Morgan/ SheenCBSO Centre Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/ Osborne/Roberts/RutterCadogan Hall Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in the attack: the first split-second; the beginning of the sound wave. Obscure or somehow cut off, that first bite of a note or chord and what’s left sounds – well, not the same as everything else, exactly, but a great deal more samey. It’s like wine-tasting while holding your nose. Everything becomes neutral, and suddenly it’s remarkably easy to fool the senses. The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino seems to enjoy playing these games. In Le voci sottevetro (1999) – four arrangements of works by the homicidal madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo – a quick splash of tuned percussion does the job…

Big MistakesNetflix Twenty Twenty SixBBC2 When following up a successful sitcom, should a writer head off into new territory or not? That was the question facing Dan Levy after Schitt’s Creek and John Morton after WIA – and now we have their answers: ‘yes’ and ‘not really, even with a change of country’ respectively. Curiously, both seem to have made the wrong choice. ‘Schitt’s,’ Levy has explained, ‘was so warm and sweet and cuddly. My natural curiosity was to go somewhere else more dangerous’; specifically, to provide ‘a story that’s thrilling but never not funny. That became the big challenge of the writers’ room.’ Seeking to rise to it, Big Mistakes – co-created with Rachel Sennott – began with the New Jersey siblings Nick and Morgan (Levy and Taylor Ortega)…

‘I fucking hate Marmite,’ said Andy McLeod, a young ad man who at some point in the mid-1990s was tasked with remarketing the savoury spread that had been around since 1902. ‘Oh, I love it,’ said his creative partner. They both then just looked at each other. You either love it or you hate it, Marmite – at least since 1996. At first, the yeast extract, made with the vitamin-rich by-products of beer-brewing at a factory in Burton on Trent, had been promoted as healthy, ‘the growing-up spread you never grow out of’. By the 1980s, it was ‘My mate, Marmite’, shouted by an army platoon, playing on its history as a supplement for British-based POWs during the second world war. For the past 30 years, though, it has become…

Having trained the runner-up in the Grand National twice – and once in the Topham Chase for good measure – Aintree gives me an annual dose of PTSD. But I’m drawn into our farm sweepstake every year as surely as the sailors in Greek mythology were lured onto the rocks by the Sirens. This year’s draw, however, was tinged with sadness, as it was the first sweep since my mother died. And boy, did she like to win it. I first watched the National with her in 1968, when Red Alligator won. We were in Gatwick airport peering at a very small television, and I was pushed to the back and told to keep an eye on the bags. I was furious. To psych myself up this year for the…

For Competition 3445 you were invited to provide a sonnet to a previously overlooked body part. In a stellar week – high fives, all round – the £25 John Lewis vouchers are awarded to the authors of those entries printed below and honourable mentions go to Caroline Burke and Mike Greenhough. Much have I dabbled in the realms of gutAnd many goodly small intestines seen,Worthy of praise in ode or sonnet, butExcepting Baudelaire’s beloved Spleen,And many a heart that aches or breaks or worse,So rarely do we see a fine intestineNor colon celebrated in blank verse;No humble organ do we see expressed inRhyme – till now. Behold, the Duodenum!Gastroscopies have nought to show more fair,Ah! Happy those endoscopists who’ve seen ’em,So eat your spleen out, Monsieur Baudelaire!Replete with glorious enzymes,…

A craggy sports shrink from Vermont is, it turns out, one of the key members of his team It’s easy to be sceptical about top sportsmen turning to psychologists for help. A bit precious, no? After all, what’s wrong with the good old Fergie hairdryer treatment to unmuddle the thinking of some bewildered player? But when you hear Rory McIlroy extolling the virtues of the man who gets inside his cranium you start to think a little differently. Dr Bob Rotella, a craggy sports shrink from Vermont, is, it turns out, one of the key members of McIlroy’s team and they have been working together for years. McIlroy paid a very handsome tribute to Rotella after his second successive Masters victory. Say what you like about Rory, but he’s got…

The Brasserie itself is long and silent, presumably because the clients are in an airport lounge Brasserie Angelica is the – is the word signature? – restaurant inside the Newman, Fitzrovia, a new hotel that has landed in the capital like a spaceship containing aliens who are into menswear. I don’t mind buildings that look like they don’t belong. Fitzrovia is charming because it feels like remnants left by other places. We have too much Edwardiana already: in the Aldwych – formerly the best surviving medieval part of London after the Great Fire – I feel like I am stomping through cakes of stone. The Newman is a wail in glass and brick on a quiet lane near Gower Street. There are pale awnings, brass fittings and uplighting: Manhattan in…

Robert Hardman is the author of Elizabeth II: In Private. In Public. The Inside Story. On p7, he wonders how the late Queen would have celebrated turning 100. John Bew, who on p24 writes about Britain’s armed forces, was foreign policy adviser to prime ministers Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer. Horatio Clare, who writes about the meaning of cormorants on p32, is the author of A Single Swallow, Orison For A Curlew and We Came By Sea. Anna Aslanyan is a writer, translator and author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History. She writes about book goofs on p34. Tom Knowles, who discusses the quest for godlike AI on p36, is a former technology correspondent for the Times.…

When John Healey was asked, on stage at the London Defence Conference, whether the armed forces were ‘ready’ for war, the Defence Secretary replied: ‘Yes.’ One of those present says: ‘That was greeted with near incredulity in the room.’ Another attendee compared Healey’s plight to someone ‘playing French cricket’, with critics from all sides hurling balls at his ankles while he tried to bat them away. ‘You can’t score any runs in French cricket.’ George Robertson, Healey’s most respected Labour predecessor and a former secretary general of Nato, was not present; he was in Scotland celebrating his 80th birthday. But he returned to give a withering interview to the FT and a speech. Having co-written the government’s strategic defence review, he warned that, because of the government’s ‘corrosive complacency’ over…

A bad night for a scattering. The river’s mouth was full.Sucked in its draught the last of himseemed indissoluble. So once again she’d got things wrong. His vinegary grinacidulous with dentures gone,the snarl, the spite left in a glass of water by the sinkwhere, magnified, their bite,tongue lashed in its acrylic pink,bobs liplessly contrite for marble cold enough to chill skinned knuckles or atone for soft spots fingered like the gills thumbed open to the bone, for lies sworn blue or love sworn blindand every day this newunsolving pain cut hands still findgut fish attending to.…

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war Twitter. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is ‘WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy’. He also claimed that ‘if I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican’. For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash-talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff. In the year 963, for example, the Emperor Otto I accused Pope John XII of fornicating with his own niece, ‘making the sacred palace a whorehouse’ while he drunkenly murdered his enemies and consecrated a ten-year-old bishop. Trump’s rhetoric…

Apollo, Artemis and Orion have not been named at random. The first two are brother and sister, and all three are known in myth as hunters – which is what the astronauts are. Ancient Greeks would have been very envious of them. The satirist Lucian (c. AD 125-180) had great fun with space travel. In his True History, he describes how he sets off with his companions to sail the Atlantic when suddenly a typhoon whirls them up to the Moon, but after many adventures he is able to return and describe what he saw. There are no women, but men act as wives. They produce children in the calf of the leg. The children are born dead but brought to life by breathing in the wind. Men then become…

Can there be any thinking person who has passed a lorry filled with live animals peering out through the slats on their way to slaughter, without a momentary shudder? How many of us would take an opportunity to inspect what happens there? Be honest: you recoil from the thought. ‘Slaughterhouse’. So unpleasant we frenchify it as ‘abattoir’. Hunting leaves me cold yet has an honesty about it: you see and choose your prey, and kill it yourself: morally a million miles from the systematic industrial slaughter of creatures we never look in the eye, couldn’t bear to see killed, and so turn away, pay others to do the killing, and deny our own agency. There are things we’d rather not think about. Take note of them. They’re the first signs…

Same old Sir: In Michael Simmons’s otherwise excellent yet alarming essay on ‘Benefits treats’ (11 April), one sentence spoiled the rest of my day: to say that pensioners are ‘protected from and by every government decision’ is maddening nonsense. Pensioners are affected in exactly the same way as everyone else whenever the government of the day changes anything. Every time we switch on the heating, shop, fill up the car, pay any bill, we are suffering under the same government-fuelled inflation as everybody else. The chaotic finances of local government mean our council tax goes up along with everybody else’s. Every time tax thresholds are frozen, many of us pay more tax. When Isa limits are reduced, many are forced either to risk their capital or accept lower taxable rates…

Cormorant: A Cultural History of Greed and Prejudice by Gordon McMullanCambridge University Press, £35, pp. 450 Greed, death, hate and clouds of destruction – this is the cormorant season all right. I was hungry to read Gordon McMullan’s book because I love the birds and looked forward to learning their secrets. But I gathered only a little about the green-glossy, serpentine jewel of a fowl I saw in Hebden Beck recently, hunting in the middle of town where I’d never seen it before. Look elsewhere for the creaturely particulars, such as the spur of bone at the back of the skull from which thick muscles link to the lower mandible, giving the corvus marinus a mighty bitey beak. This book is not concerned with what we know about cormorants but…

Rogues, Widows and Orphans: Mischief and Misadventures in the World of Books by Rebecca LeeProfile, £20, pp. 304 ‘As anyone who has gleefully spotted a typo in a prestigious publication, felt a flicker of schadenfreude at a pompous critic’s downfall, or secretly enjoyed a literary scandal knows, it is possible to love books while delighting in their disasters.’ The sentiment expressed in Rogues, Widows and Orphans is familiar to this reviewer. Rebecca Lee, who has been an editor for two decades, knows very well how words ‘get good’ (to quote the title of her earlier book) and what happens when they go wrong. Her new work ‘offers a lick of every flavour of ick lit’, leaving the reader craving more. Errors and omissions in print have consequences for everyone involved.…

The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian MallabyAllen Lane, £30, pp. 464 Can artificial intelligence become godlike? Can such technology unravel the world’s great mysteries? Can everything, from love and intuition to consciousness and wonder, be replicated by computers and reduced to simply knowing the right algorithm? These are the big questions running through Sebastian Mallaby’s engaging book The Infinity Machine, which charts the rise of DeepMind, the London-based AI research firm owned by Google, and its exceptionally clever co-founder and chief executive, Demis Hassabis. The book’s narrative is centred on Hassabis’s hope to make DeepMind the first company to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in which computers can match or surpass humans at virtually all cognitive tasks, and the morality of such an…

CopenhagenHampstead Theatre, until 2 May Rowling In ItKing’s Head Theatre, until 18 April Copenhagen by Michael Frayn is a problem play. It debuted at the National in 1998 and ran for two years in the West End before transferring to Broadway. Since then, no UK producer has mounted a revival. Something must alarm investors. It’s a very chatty show. Three actors with three wooden chairs appear on a plain stage reciting dialogue about a meeting in Denmark in 1941 between the physicist Niels Bohr, his missus, and a family friend, Werner Heisenberg. The discussion focuses on the main developments in atomic science during the 20th century. Mrs Bohr, played by Alex Kingston, is there to offer a female angle on the ruminations of the two mega-nerds. And even before they…

The Art of AdventureApple, Spotify and other platforms Life WithoutBBC Sounds The dark side of the Moon, a broken loo and a floating jar of Nutella: such was Artemis II. When Helen Sharman joined the Mir space station in 1991, becoming the first Briton to visit space, the appetite was rather for oranges. Not only were they ‘rare in the Soviet Union then’, Sharman recalls on a new podcast, but they lent the cramped space a reassuringly fresh aroma. The Art of Adventure hosts an interview about a different exploration each week, from George Mallory’s expedition to Everest in 1924, to Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated Endurance, and Sharman’s space flight. It has been steadily climbing the charts, which is a feat in itself, given that it’s hosted by a shop, rather…

Behold this tube, mankind’s digestive tract, A marvel of design – relax! Contract! It moves your food in peristaltic waves And mostly it complies, and it behaves. — Competition, p58 Automation is about to take over the world, apparently. But the fightback has begun. On a cold, blowy day a few weeks ago, I joined a stop-the-bots demonstration that marched through the Knowledge Quarter of King’s Cross where Facebook and Google have their headquarters. A group of 100 activists gathered on Pentonville Road for a warm-up rally addressed by a charismatic young woman in a leather skirt. ‘Can we trust the tech bros with our data?’ she cried into the mic. ‘No! Do we need regulation now? Yes we do!’ She congratulated us for ‘making history by…

There are few things more delicious than falling down a rabbit hole. No, don’t worry, I’m not serving up a second recipe for rabbit in a row. I mean discovering a recipe or dish which, not only have I not cooked or tried before, but haven’t even heard of. A little while ago, a reader asked me about Hawkshead cake, which Beatrix Potter used to make with her husband at Christmas. Hawkshead is the village Potter grew up in, in the Lake District, and the cake is actually more of a tart, made with puff pastry and filled with currants and syrup. This is where the proverbial rabbit hole came in, because I couldn’t quite stop there. I then learned about the whole class of sticky currant cakes which come…

Q. I went to a party last weekend and my father asked me to go and introduce myself if I saw a certain woman there. When I saw her I knew from my father’s description (unusual facial features) she was the person and I went to say hello. Embarrassingly she said something like: ‘You are clever, how did you know it was me?’ How should I have handled this? – S.H., Ludlow, Salop A. Had she already been in a conversational cluster, you might have replied: ‘My father told me you would be easy to find because you would be the person with most people wanting to talk to you.’ Were she alone you could have asserted: ‘My father said you would be easy to find as you would be…

When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking up courage, while I’m busy in the kitchen. Normally he sits idly by. It’s the loitering that is unsettling. He might get a job, if he could fly, as a loitering munition. These drones hover or circle until they detect a target. In 1988 an article in the American Air Force Magazine mentioned unmanned aircraft being developed to ‘loiter on high and then swoop down’. In 2022, Britain declared it would send ‘hundreds of loitering aerial munitions’ to Ukraine. Loitering, in use since Chaucer’s day, comes from a Dutch word meaning ‘to wag about (like a loose tooth)’. The Vagrancy Act, 1824, penalised petty chapmen, common prostitutes, idle and disorderly…