Tabla de contenidos para 15 November 2025 en The Spectator

Labour: the clue should be in the name. In March, Keir Starmer branded Labour the ‘party of work’. If ‘you want to work’, he declared, ‘the government should support you, not stop you’. Even as his premiership staggers from crisis to crisis, that mission remains. If Labour doesn’t stand for ‘working people’ – however nebulously defined – it stands for nothing. As such, this week’s unemployment figures are more than just embarrassing for Starmer; they are a betrayal of his party’s founding purpose. Unemployment has risen to 5 per cent – its highest rate since February 2021, in the middle of the third lockdown. There has been a 180,000 reduction in the number of payrolled staff since October last year – or rather, since Rachel Reeves’s first Budget increased employer…

A few years ago, I watched an Irishmade drama on Netflix called Rebellion. Given that it was about the 1916 Easter Rising, I expected it to be somewhat anti-British but was pleasantly surprised. I knew the basics of what happened, but the series made me question why I knew so little about Irish history and politics more generally. I could name each taoiseach (prime minister) going back to Jack Lynch but, apart from Eamon de Valera, none before him. So I began to read voraciously about our nearest neighbour. Having edited books about British prime ministers and American presidents, I decided that one of the (now) 16 men who have held the office of taoiseach since 1922 might make an interesting project. I then came up against a whole gaggle…

At the end of last month, a judge in Belfast issued a verdict that was both right and wrong. The case related to a man known to the public only as ‘Soldier F’. He was one of the members of the Parachute Regiment involved in the events of the day in January 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday. That day 13 members of the public were shot dead during a civil rights march in Londonderry that turned violent. The precise details are probably more heavily documented than those of any other day in history thanks to the Saville Inquiry, which became the longest and costliest legal inquiry in British history. Indeed, it made the trial of Warren Hastings look like a snap verdict. It is more than two decades…

When Russian dissidents were bundled off into exile under the tsars, they were sent to Siberia, the ‘prison without a roof’, and disappeared from society, never to be seen again. Many residents of Norfolk, where the King has exiled his brother, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, will be hoping he follows the same route. Norfolk likes to call itself a ‘royal county’, as the Visit Norfolk website proudly proclaims. Sandringham, the family’s private home, is well known. But the royal connection pre-dates Queen Victoria’s purchase of the country retreat for her son Albert in 1862 by almost 800 years. William the Conqueror ordered the construction of Norwich Castle as a royal palace in the aftermath of the Norman conquest, and his son William II began work on the stone keep in 1094.…

Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle class can stretch to. It’s a predictable narrative. It’s also wrong, or at least, far from the whole truth. I say this having lived the messy reality of fostering, where I’ve had the privilege, and sometimes pain, of stepping into lives different from my own. For more than 20 years, I’ve cared for children pulled from homes where parenting skills are scarce and where ‘dinner’ might consist of a handful of sweets and a packet…

Back to reality Sir: The harms caused by cannabis are not a result of a failure to police it properly (‘Stench of failure’, 8 November). They are primarily because the distribution of it is controlled by criminals rather than corporations. Criminal gangs maximise their profits by pushing more addictive forms of drugs, and their activity wreaks misery on their families and communities. Psychosis is only associated with skunk, which is a more addictive form of cannabis, high in THC relative to CBD. Smokers of this are estimated to be 2.6 times more likely to have psychotic-like experiences than non-smokers. Herbal cannabis is not associated with psychosis; in fact, the high levels of CBD in it have some therapeutic and even antipsychotic benefits. Criminalising this less potent form in particular is…

The Hopeless Biker: Who Went Twice Around the Worldby Miles Morland Muswell Press, £25, pp. 248 A beguiling cinema advert back in the 1970s showed a young man with a series of doors closing around him with resounding clunks. First, he was hemmed in by the boredom of school, then work, and finally a mortgage – but as soon as he got the keys to his first motorbike, he could hit the open road and escape to freedom. Vroom, vroom. I seem to remember the initial scenes were in grim black and white, but when he got the bike everything switched to vibrant colour – although that may be false memory syndrome. Anyway it seems to have resonated with a certain generation – mine – as I know at least…

It Started in Damascus: How the Long Syrian Revolution Shaped Our Worldby Rime Allaf Hurst, £20, pp. 333 Rime Allaf takes the long view of Syria’s descent into hell. Her story begins with President Hafez al Assad, the architect of the socialist Baathist dictatorship that, from 1970 to 2000, immiserated and impoverished an entire nation before his son and successor Bashar utterly destroyed it. It Started in Damascus is part history, part memoir, the story of a people whose hopes for a better life have been consistently strangled by the Assad dynasty for more than half a century. A Syrian-born writer and analyst who comes from a distinguished diplomatic family, Allaf is unflinching when she trains her sights on regime depravity. It makes for disturbing, compulsive and at times heart-in-the-mouth…

Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimistby David Bather Woods University of Chicago Press, £24, pp. 296 According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’. Thankfully, this contemptuous attitude towards biographers has not deterred David Bather Woods, a professor at Warwick University, from taking a fresh look at one of the most influential yet misunderstood figures in western philosophy. Woods’s prose is clear and compelling, though the book’s thematic structure is confusing. He argues that the defining event in Schopenhauer’s life was the suspected suicide of…

The Makropulos CaseRoyal Opera House, until 21 November Die RheinnixenBattersea Arts Centre Janacek’s The Makropulos Case is a weird and very wonderful opera, but its basic plot isn’t hard to follow. Still, it seems to send directors into a tailspin. One recent production (since revised) had a cast member break character and pull out a flipchart to recap the story so far. Katie Mitchell’s new staging for the Royal Opera takes the more familiar route of updating the action to the present, and it’s always fascinating to see what opera directors think we’ll find relatable. Luxury hotels, recreational heroin use, Tinder hookups with locally sourced hotties: no, me neither. How the other half live, eh? In short, it’s a bit like Mitchell’s 2022 re-imagining of Handel’s Theodora. Once again, Mitchell…

‘Where are you off to now?’ I asked the fellow from Hong Kong as he and his wife stood in the hallway ready to leave, their many suitcases beside them. At first it sounded like he said ‘Ukraine!’ very cheerfully, but he couldn’t have said that, obviously, so I asked again. ‘I mean, now you’re leaving West Cork, where are you off to next on your holiday? The Ring of Kerry? Killarney? The Cliffs of Moher?’ He stared at me like I was stupid. ‘Ukraine!’ he said, and then when I stared back he shouted: ‘U-KRAINE! You know Ukraine? Big war Russia Ukraine! Ukraine?’ ‘Yes, I understand you keep saying Ukraine, it’s just that I was under the impression you were on a road trip around Ireland.’ ‘Yeah we go…

Cooee, we’re back! What? Oh, I’m talking about our second annual Spectator Wine Club assault on Bordeaux. I thought you knew. We had one heck of a trip, thanks so much for asking, and lost nobody in the field. With drinking boots brightly polished we easily saw off seven wineries and several dozen bottles in five days. And who knew that Spectator readers could come up with such hilarious – not to say smutty – limericks? Yes, I’m looking at you Sir Richard. And you, Nick, and you, Paul. If I had any hair left on my pate, it would have curled. We tasted remarkable wines and were looked after beautifully. The trouble is, after a few days drinking everything from Crémant de Bordeaux to white, red and sweet, it’s…

Iain Dale writes this week’s Diary on p7. His most recent book is The Taoiseach: A Century of Political Leadership. Allan Mallinson exposes the extent of the British Army’s DEI takeover on p14. He is an author and former army officer. Rosie Lewis, who argues for the return of home economics on p22, is a foster carer and the author of Silenced. Genevieve Gaunt reads Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s new novella on p34. She is an actor, podcast host and interviewer. Peter Bradshaw, who reviews a new work on David Lynch on p35, has been the Guardian’s chief film critic since 1999.…

Keir Starmer is stuck in a catch-22. If he is to avoid the threat of continual leadership challenges, the Prime Minister will need to deal with what every poll shows are the public’s three overriding concerns: the cost of living, rampant illegal immigration and the state of the NHS. But if serious progress is made in any of these areas, it is likely to turn the minister responsible into a viable leadership candidate. Let’s call it catch-25. Rachel Reeves at the Treasury has a monumental task and is politically tied to the Starmer project, so she can be ruled out. Of the other two key issues, most progress has been made in reducing NHS waiting lists, the task of Wes Streeting. Which may explain why a senior Downing Street aide…

The most influential person in British media is not Rupert Murdoch or Lord Rothermere – it’s the editor who pushes out the BBC News app alerts. While many people gave up watching BBC News years ago, the corporation still dominates how millions receive their news, thanks to the app. Last year, it overtook Apple News to become Britain’s most-visited news app. Whoever controls those push notifications has the power to make the phones of the app’s 14.2 million users buzz with notifications several times a day, providing a constant stream of news updates and reaching a far larger audience than that of any television news bulletin, newspaper or magazine. So how is this power used? I’ve analysed a year of alerts on the BBC News app, and there is a…

Donald Trump has knocked down the east wing of the White House and is turning it into his Golden Ballroom. Might he be tempted to go a step further and build a Golden House (Domus aurea), as Nero did? Nero was as besotted with gold as Trump is. He wrote poems in gold, preserved his first beard in a golden box, possessed a golden fishing net, had a golden box of poisons and golden chamber pot, and shod his second wife’s mules in gold. When the king of Armenia visited, he had the theatre of Pompey – the stage, the walls, everything – somehow gilded. In 64 BC a devastating fire hit Rome (was Nero complicit?). Only four out of Rome’s 14 regions were untouched. While Nero did a superb…

Anew drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in British society. I call it ‘Lastminute.non’. Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday. The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onwards throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages. It happened to me last month, on…

Every time you feel down about Britain’s out-of-touch elites, a look across the Atlantic is a reassuring reminder that it could be worse. Hollywood, in particular, seems incapable of learning lessons. The highlight for me was when various actors tried to comfort people during the pandemic by recording a butchered version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ from their California mansions. As if the worst song ever written wasn’t already bad enough. Such political tone-deafness has become such a stock trope of Hollywood that it has been lampooned at length, most brilliantly by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in Team America: World Police (2004). ‘As actors it is our responsibility to read the newspapers and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion,’ solemnly intones…

The softening of the Bank of England’s stance on ‘stablecoins’ looks like another tugging of the British forelock towards the Trump regime. Stablecoins are virtual money akin to cryptocurrency, but theoretically safer because their value is pegged to the dollar or other conventional currencies. Often used by investors to buy into crypto, they’re claimed to offer a more efficient future for international payments – but also accused of facilitating crime. Two years ago, Governor Andrew Bailey decreed that stablecoins did not ‘meet the standards we expect of safe money’; other non-US regulators largely agreed. That well-known crypto player Donald Trump, however, called them ‘perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the internet’. And since his state visit in September, with Treasury secretary Scott Bessent alongside to…

Love Divine: A Novellaby Ysenda Maxtone Graham Slightly Foxed, £22, pp. 272 Love Divine, the debut novella by Ysenda Maxtone Graham, is set in the leafy, fictional parish of Lamley Green and weaves together a tableau of stories about the community. The title comes from the hymn ‘Come Down, O Love Divine’; but beneath this bourgeois Church of England world of round-robins and milky tea is a satirical portrait of a parish with a dark underbelly. Maxtone Graham perfectly captures hypocritical English chit-chat, and the polyphony of perspectives works well. The central thread concerns Lucy Fanthorpe, 54, who is hit by the sudden death of her beloved husband Nick and the gradual realisation that he might have been having an affair. One of my favourite characters is Hugh, the lonely…

One day, according to a venerable anecdote, an earl pushed his way into Hans Holbein’s London workshop demanding that his portrait be painted straight away. Understandably annoyed, Holbein hit him. This nobleman then asked Henry VIII to punish the painter, but apparently the monarch replied: ‘I can make seven earls (if it pleased me) from seven peasants – but I could not make one Hans Holbeen [sic], or so excellent an artist, out of seven earls.’ Holbein’s pictures must have seemed miraculous when they appeared in Tudor England. In fact they still do. Seeing them is like opening a window into the past and finding it populated by people like those you might pass in the street today. Elizabeth Goldring’s splendid Holbein: Renaissance Master (Paul Mellon Centre, £40), richly illustrated,…

Queen Victoria’s NightmaresBBC Radio 4 When the Words LeaveBBC Radio 3 Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited the madness of her grandfather, George III, Prince Albert summoned her doctor. Robert Ferguson was not the obvious man for this scenario – he was an obstetrician – but the doughty queen had heard that he ‘paid much attention to mental disease’, and willingly consulted him. It wasn’t until 2009 that the precise nature of Victoria’s ‘mental disease’ came to light. Dr Ferguson’s diaries, formerly kept in private hands, came up for auction that year and entered the collection of the Royal College of Physicians. Their contents made for sad and startling reading. ‘By the one sense,’ Ferguson began…

Last month, the founder of the Browns restaurant chain was charged with killing his mother. Shocking news, but it feels somehow appropriate. Browns is the traditional lunch spot for families looking to feed their student child, the place where 2.2s are revealed and doomed university girlfriends introduced. Many parents have found themselves spending hundreds on lunch only to be told their far greater investment has been wasted on dreams of becoming a club promoter. Steak frites, please, with a side order of murderous intent. Browns began in Brighton, but only really got going when it spread to Oxford and Cambridge in the 1980s. Bristol got one in the early 1990s, decking out a neo-Byzantine library next to the Wills Memorial Building. It’s where I drank Bloody Marys before being graduated…

Michael Gove writes: The Spectator asks only one thing of its writers: that they entertain. Susanna Gross, who wrote our bridge column in this space for 25 years, never failed. She played the game expertly, and with panache, representing England in international competitions. But formidable as her skills at the table were, she was even more accomplished as a writer. And unforgettable as a friend. Susanna made every encounter memorable. Over cards or drinks, in these pages, or during her time as literary editor of the Mail on Sunday, she was captivating. She had an unerring eye, both for opponents’ weaknesses during play, and for the quirks of character which illuminate the human condition. Susanna was rapier sharp and witty, but also unaffectedly warm and loving and unsparingly honest And…

The world’s top players prepare their openings in astonishing detail. Powerful chess computers, accessed via the cloud and thus available to everyone, make the process of analysis vastly more efficient than it used to be. Positions which once would have taken days to analyse ‘by hand’ can be explored exhaustively in an hour or two. Of course, that doesn’t mean they all pack up by lunchtime and adjourn to the beach. The paradox of technology applies in chess as in life: the workload multiplies to fill the time. The top players still work harder, on the whole, but they distinguish themselves not only with the depth of their knowledge, but also its breadth. When everyone has the same tools, there is no ‘edge’ in following 30 moves of computer analysis…

Have a thought for Darren Grimes, the 32-year-old Reform councillor. Since becoming deputy leader of Durham County Council in May, he has been investigated more than two dozen times by his officials following complaints. Among other things, he has been accused of bringing the council into disrepute, failing to treat people with respect and not representing people with different views. Of those complaints, the vast majority have been dismissed, but a handful are still under investigation. Darren has condemned this ‘persecution’ and he’s amended the council’s code of conduct to include clauses protecting free speech. I should declare an interest since those amendments were based on a policy the Free Speech Union drafted for Bromley Council with a councillor called Simon Fawthrop, himself subject to vexatious complaints. But if the…

Q. A very likeable woman has joined the company I work for and also just moved to my village. I said I would give a drinks party for her so she could meet a few people. My husband told me we should have a cap of 20. Now my colleague has asked if she can bring her two twentysomething children and their partners. This skews the numbers slightly, but the bigger problem is that she has also asked three neighbours of mine who have never been in the house before. She said she ‘assumed they would be welcome’. Well, there is a reason these three have never been in my house, and without wanting to sound pompous, their being entertained by me will disrupt the social ecology of the village.…

‘Pop goes the weasel!’ my husband exclaimed, expertly muddying the waters. We had just been listening to another news bulletin that referred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer being expected to ‘break her pledge’ in the Budget. It seemed to me that the ink on pledges were scarcely dry before they became aspirations that came to nothing. We are told that not raising income tax was ‘a key manifesto pledge’. Why don’t we imitate the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of our forebears and resort to frithborh or frank-pledge? It was a system making each householder of a tithing (ten households) responsible for the other nine. This fits in with the root meaning of pledge – a hostage held as security for the fulfilment of a promise. A hostage is still taken and…

When the BBC denies ‘systemic bias’, it denies the main, the crucial thing exposed by Michael Prescott’s now-famous leaked internal memo. Prescott was not presenting a ragbag of mistakes, but examples from many different areas of subjects where an institutional view prevailed – against Donald Trump, pro-trans, pro-immigration etc, all of them defensible views but none of them following rules of impartiality or accuracy. For this reason, the Prescott material about Israel/Gaza coverage is the most important by a long way, though less expensive for the BBC than its doctoring of Trump’s words. It is about a systemic failure, which can only be accounted for by bias, failure to explain what Hamas is up to, to question its actions, its casualty statistics or the bona fides of the Hamas-supporting ‘journalists’…

Last month, in a two-page letter to colonels of corps and regiments, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General David Eastman, inadvertently exposed the moral confusion, panic even, possessing parts of the British Army. Invited to dine by retired and serving officer members of the private London club Boodle’s, Eastman was dismayed to discover that there were ‘restrictions on the rooms that can be accessed’ by women. In his subsequent letter, he expresses concern that, even in mixed clubs, ‘rules, policies or cultural practices may not align with the army’s commitment to inclusivity’. And so, like Widmerpool in his pomp, he calls for corps and regiments to review their affiliations with private members’ clubs and insists that they ‘engage’ with offending clubs to ‘advocate for change’, which he says…

Helping her country ski ever more steeply down the wrong side of the Laffer curve, Rachel Reeves may be preparing to violate Labour’s manifesto and raise income tax – perhaps a suitable juncture at which to examine just how wacko the UK tax code is already. Start with the duplicity of ‘national insurance’. This unhypothecated add-on simply pours into the Treasury’s coffers as plain taxes. Yet much of the populace still believes that NI specifically funds the NHS. This is misunderstanding by design. The sly mislabelling is a resentment blocker. In truth, the employee basic tax rate is a straight-up 28 per cent, not 20 as advertised. The mooted Reeves proposal of raising income tax by 2 per cent and reducing basic-rate NI by 2 per cent is dishonest. She…

One morning a few months ago I was walking past St James’s Park station when a dishevelled man with his fists clenched stepped into my path without warning. He stared at me furiously and blocked my path, body almost shaking. For a few tense seconds he stood there before I crossed the road to get away from him. When I told friends who work in central London about this incident, I was shocked at how typical my experience was. For people who commute into Westminster, it is becoming commonplace to be spat at, lunged at and screamed at to ‘fuck off’ by individuals who appear to be high on illegal drugs. One colleague told me she had been threatened with a knife by one such individual and forced to take…

Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Centuryby Melanie McDonagh Yale University Press, £25, pp. 368 Religious conversions do not, for the most part, make for good anecdotes. An exception can be found in Patricia Lockwood’s memoir Priestdaddy, which describes the author’s father Greg’s road to Damascus experience in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Norway, where he watched The Exorcist 72 times: That eerie, pea-soup light was pouring down, and all around him men in sailor suits were getting the bejesus scared out of them, and the bejesus flew into my father like a dart into a bull’s eye. It was, Greg boasted, ‘the deepest conversion on record’. The 12 conversions explored by Melanie McDonagh in this absorbing study are…

Political Girl: Life and Fate in Russiaby Maria Alyokhina Allen Lane, £25, pp. 480 Penal Colony No. 2. A girl in a green coat. Red splashes of fireworks against the night sky. She arrives back in Moscow: photographers, a clamour of questions, what is it like to be free? Meetings, cops, her little six-year-old son with a sparkler, a video being recorded, her mother nearby, anxious. Like the flickering, scratchy lens of a film projector, Maria Alyokhina’s Political Girl illuminates the story of her life from the moment she and the other members of Pussy Riot were let out of prison in 2013 until, in 2022, she finally fled Russia disguised as a delivery driver. Nine years of fighting the slowly tightening noose of Putin’s regime with an endless, almost…

Grade: A Welcome to the Andalusian cadence, the minor fall and the major lift, the descent from Am through G and F to E. Welcome also to Rosalia Vila Tobella, who is not Andalusian, but Catalan, but uses that cadence an awful lot, much as Status Quo prefer to stick to C, F, G. She has been much praised for the depth and ambition of her compositions – and commercially much rewarded when those compositions, sometimes appended to fairly straightforward EDM, get the kind of downloads you would more usually expect from Ariane Grande. Though I find a good few of the compositions comparatively slight, there is no doubting the melodic invention of the arrangements. This is either Spanish pop, but without a paloma blanca in sight, or Spanish classical…

TrespassesChannel 4 Play for Today: Never Too LateChannel 5 Yeats famously summarised Ireland in the four words, ‘Great hatred, little room’. But, as Louise Kennedy’s 2022 debut novel Trespasses showed, in 1970s Northern Ireland the hatred had grown even greater and the room even littler. Channel 4’s faithful adaptation began – as it would continue over its four parts this week – with the suffocating omnipresence of sectarianism. As 24-year-old Cushla (Lola Petticrew) drove through her small town, everything she saw screamed Catholicism or Protestantism: the graffiti, the flags, the ash on children’s foreheads at the start of Lent. By night, Cushla worked in a bar where the punters were either nervously or aggressively aware of each other’s religion. By day, she taught in a school where the priest warned…

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard/Covent Garden SinfoniaRoyal Albert Hall Super Jet KinokoThe Owl & Hitchhiker On YouTube – and I urge you to look it up – there is a magnificent piece of footage from German TV, in which big band leader James Last leads his orchestra into a medley of hard rock hits, opening with Hawkwind’s deathless space-rock drone ‘Silver Machine’. And damn it if they don’t nail it. The members of the band with electric instruments play it just as Hawkwind did: the whooshing synth, the thudding bass, the fuzzing guitar. But instead of Lemmy growling out the topline melody, there is a huge rush of brass from the band, the brightness cutting unexpectedly through the murk. It is, unironically, brilliant. I have no desire to investigate…

An exhibition at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam devoted to the multi-talented and award-winning actress Tilda Swinton, runs until February. Reading about it prompted me to think back to the mid-2000s, when I got to know her slightly. Through work, her then partner, the artist and playwright John Byrne, came down from Nairn to stay in Glasgow for a few days. I’d first heard of him when I was a teenager – he was responsible for his friend Gerry Rafferty’s 1970s album covers, and later went on to write The Slab Boys trilogy and the 1987 TV series Tutti Frutti, which starred Robbie Coltrane and Emma Thompson. Because Tilda was away filming one of the Narnia films and their nanny was due days off, John brought their twins, a…

A pecan pie has been on my kitchen table for the past few days, due to circumstances rendering every other surface or shelf unusable, thanks to badly timed building work and an absent fridge. A mixing bowl sits over it, protecting it from dust and sticky fingers. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: everybody loves pecan pie. Everyone who has walked past it has stopped dead, done a double take, and then rhapsodised unprompted about the pie’s virtues. At one point, excitement was generated simply by the pie being in the background of a video call. Pecan pie, one of America’s traditional celebration (especially Thanksgiving) puddings, is adored by children, but it has a dark, complex sweetness that wins over grown-ups too, and the toasty nuts bring texture as well…

Competition 3425 was prompted by Gill Hornby, a biographer of Jane Austen, telling an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival that Jane’s sister Cassandra did the novelist’s reputation a favour by burning most of her letters, and if that hadn’t happened she might have been cancelled: ‘She has become this very vague, hazy figure, like God and Shakespeare…’. You were invited to ‘find’ a letter that had escaped the bonfire. There was a strong response, though a few entries crossed into sacrilege. The best got something of the tone while casting her in an unexpected light. Tom Adam found her channelling thunderers de nos jours: ‘I grow quite weary of the Hampshire Chronicle. It contrives to fill every advertisement with faces so exceedingly foreign, that I might fancy myself transported…

One possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts in property, housebuilding, planning and local government and then ask them for proposals to put an end to the appallingly slow rate of construction and development. Another possible solution to the housing crisis is to convene a group of experts who know absolutely nothing about property, housebuilding, planning or local government and ask them for proposals to put an end to the appallingly slow rate of construction and development. My money’s on the second group to solve the problem. We vastly underestimate the value of healthy ignorance in overcoming seemingly intractable challenges. There is a Chinese proverb which states: ‘If you want to know what water is like, do not ask a fish.’ Steve Jobs didn’t…

Solemn, moving, serious: British. As silence fell and the wreaths were lain, even teenagers joined in the mood of reverence. Suddenly it did not matter what the gossip columns were saying about Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, or what latest mischief might arise from the Duchess of Sussex. The great ship of state and of history sailed on serenely. The sacrifices of a previous generation were saluted. They had paid the price for their Britishness. We, their successors, unworthy as we might feel, could at least salute them, especially as good bottles were about to be opened, to toast the fallen. Yet there was a problem far more important than princely indiscretions. We British won the war. Since then, we have defended the peace. Hard fighting is a tough business. The battlefield…