Tabla de contenidos para 3 January 2026 en The Spectator

In 1956, Malta held a referendum on joining the United Kingdom. Since the islands were economically reliant on the Royal Navy, it was unsurprising that three-quarters of those voting believed their future lay in integrating with their colonial masters. But after a lukewarm response from the British government, the referendum result was never implemented and Malta instead hastened towards independence. Seven decades on, it seems the Maltese had a lucky escape. The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) has declared that Malta’s living standards will overtake Britain’s by 2035. It cites Malta’s low taxes and pro-enterprise culture, which are especially attractive for the wealthy Britons fleeing a country that lacks both. In contrast, the CEBR predicts Britain’s growth will be the G7’s second weakest until 2030. The roots of…

The chief function of the prime minister is to take the blame, and Sir Keir Starmer can no more escape this rule than his predecessors did. Having met him occasionally when he was my local MP, before he moved from Kentish Town to Downing Street, I feel a twinge of sympathy with him. He took trouble with unimportant people, could not have been more genial when I bumped into him at the Pineapple, his local pub, and on one occasion even asked if I could explain the attraction of Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. I feared this task would be beyond my powers of exposition, and perhaps also his powers of comprehension, so changed the subject. But in those days Sir Keir had a sincerity which disarmed criticism. This is…

World’s stock of afternoons is running shortAnd summer’s light is turning golden brown –It’s time to summon up our winter thoughts Since poetry will always be our sportAnd images, once mothered, won’t disownOur afternoons, though old, though running short, For in mind’s shadows metaphors hold courtAnd new dreams swarm. We fully ownIt’s time to conjure up our winter thoughts, New entities of if and how, the sortThat make us glad to live in winter townsWhose broken afternoons are falling short. We know, we know, it’s late for afterthoughts –Regrets composted, failures set down,Dead things that glitter up as winter thought – But we have lived and fought and soughtAnd been and seen and known yet never flown,Since we were made for thinking winter thoughtsIn afternoons both sceptical and short.…

What would you like the priorities of His Majesty’s government to be? I have quite a long list. Sorting out the economy would certainly be up there, as would closing the border. But I imagine the government has had to put such things on the backburner because it turns out that one of its actual top priorities has been ensuring that Alaa Abd el-Fattah can come to the UK. Who, I hear you ask? El-Fattah turns out to be an Egyptian ‘activist’ who has lately spent a certain amount of time in the prisons of General Sisi. In 2021 he gained British citizenship through his mother, who lives in the UK. I think that clears up any fears of the anti-integrationist movement in this country by the way. That is…

I have recently begun training for holy orders in the Church of England. I know, they’re getting desperate. My motivation for wanting to be a priest is selfish. I want more joy in my life. You might feel that joy is to be found in extreme sports, or pop concerts, or snorting coke from the midriffs of hookers. But I think you mean pleasure. Joy is deeper, linked to a sense of the goodness of existence. It seems to me that joy is to be found in doing cultural things. I don’t mean going to plays or art galleries; I mean cultural things that are very participatory and democratic. Things like this: getting to know people who are different from me, through putting on a little play, making stuff for…

I didn’t force any hyacinths this Christmas. Most years I plant a dozen bulbs at the end of September and hide them in a dark corner so they’re ready for Christmas Day – they never are, of course, but they usually arrive shortly after the Wise Men on Epiphany. But last September I took out the wooden planters – oak boxes stamped with the date of our wedding, a gift for our fourth wedding anniversary (wood) – and they fell apart in my hands, the wood split and rotten. I always thought the Christmases Yet to Come after my wife and I separated would be sad and un-Christmassy. I saw a vacant seat in the chimney-corner and all that. But even though my wife’s lawyer is pushing through the divorce…

Forecasting is a mug’s game, as the Bank of England governor Mervyn King once said. But I’ll sketch a few trends for 2026 nevertheless, starting on a positive note in the stock market before moving on to some of the many choices on an à la carte menu of gloom. The FTSE 100 index will have ended 2025 almost 20 per cent higher than it started – slightly better than the US S&P 500 index – and the consensus of fund managers is that (having closed for Christmas at 9,870) it will carry on upwards, perhaps even towards 11,000. Why? In short because many UK blue-chips in traditional sectors such as banking, housebuilding and mining have been undervalued for too long, because interest-rate cuts will help, and because stock markets…

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood Chatto, £30, pp. 752 In the introduction to Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood recalls her initial response to the suggestion that she write a memoir: ‘Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?’ Her autobiography was hardly the stuff of high adventure: ‘I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book.’ This is not what they meant, her publishers replied: ‘We meant a memoir in, you know, a literary style.’ While Book of Lives is about a great deal more than Atwood churning out prizewinning novels, it is not written in a ‘literary style’. The style, if anything, is anti-literary. Atwood’s voice is casual,…

The Taoiseach: A Century of Political Leadership edited by Iain Dale Swift, £20, pp. 362 My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which the person was a player. My strongest memory of Disraeli, from a 1951 book by Hesketh Pearson, is his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837, when, after being heckled and jeered at for his flamboyant dress and delivery, he said: ‘Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.’ These days I…

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Story of Spinal Tap by Rob Reiner et al Simon & Schuster, £25, pp. 288 A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever – credited to the late Rob Reiner, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer, as well as to their Tap alter-egos Marty Dibergi, Nigel Tufnel, David St Hubbins and Derek Smalls – serves as a fitting companion to This is Spinal Tap (1984), the mother of all mockumentaries, much beloved by middle-aged men and their poor put-upon children. (My wife and my daughter, I should say, absolutely hate it: but then they prefer Pitch Perfect – and Pitch Perfect 2. So there’s no accounting for taste.) Part oral history, part behind-the-scenes memoir and part self-aware parody of rock memoir,…

Tom’s Crossing by Mark Z. DanielewskiPantheon, £30, pp. 1232 Mark Z. Danielewski is best known for his House of Leaves, a typographically delirious horror novel about a manuscript written by a blind man describing a film which showed an impossible house. It seemed to exhaust a particular kind of postmodernism of footnotes, cryptography, metatexts, pop culture and more, yet remained at heart a story about grief. Tom’s Crossing is more immediately accessible, but it is every bit as clever and even more emotionally devastating. The bulk of the action takes place over five days running up to Halloween in 1982, although with a preface, ‘Some of what happened before’, and a longer epilogue, ‘Some of what happened after’. The preface introduces Tom Gatestone, an endearing prankster (boys called Tom in…

Grade: D A Montreal band led by a Ukrainian/ Canadian called Ivan Doruschuk, with a histrionic baritone, famous solely for having had the most ludicrous hit of that ludicrous decade, the 1980s, with ‘Safety Dance’. Perhaps more famous still was the hilarious video that accompanied the song: Mr Doruschuck in medieval gear cavorting in fields with peasants, throttling a dwarf and entrancing a very pretty blonde woman who looked well up for it. Status Quo, bizarrely, covered ‘Safety Dance’, but the band had no more hits. Why on earth are they still going? Who gave them the advance for a new album? And is it any good? No, of course not. It’s portentous synth pop-by-numbers, with the kind of execrable lyrics you got back then. So the opener ‘I Love…

When I lose a game of chess, I tend to know exactly where it went awry. Take the following position, where I faced Alireza Firouzja at the XTX Markets London Chess Classic, held at the Emirates Stadium in December. Firouzja, rated in the world top ten, was the top seed at the Elite section, and his canny middlegame play had taken me out of my comfort zone. In the position below, my first instinct was 21 Bxd5, but I was nervous: after 21…Nxd5 22 Qxe5 Bd6 23 Qd4 his active pieces, and my wayward horse on a5, seemed to offer ample compensation for the sacrificed pawn. But then the thought crossed my mind – why trade off my bishop at all? Before I knew it, I had played a howler.…

Going to see QPR on Boxing Day has become a tradition in the Young household – and not because we hold out much hope of winning. The Hoops have only won 19 of the 71 Boxing Day fixtures we’ve played since 1882, when the club was founded. The last time was in 2018, when we beat Ipswich 3-0 at home, and we haven’t won away since 1967. But going to watch our team, however poorly we play, beats festering at home in that fallow period between Christmas Day and 1 January, so my three sons and I piled into the car for the 150-mile round-trip to Fratton Road in Portsmouth. We had an additional reason for making the journey, which was a special Christmas offer from Toby Carvery whereby anyone…

Perhaps because of the Flanders and Swann song in which a louche older gentleman tries to lure a younger lady to bed with Madeira wine, the drink has unfairly acquired a fusty image. While port and sherry have experienced a resurgence, Madeira remains underappreciated despite the fact it stands as a proud monument to the grand old Anglo-Portuguese alliance. One man, Jamie Allsopp, is intent on fighting a noble battle to promote the virtues of Madeira. And so to the Blue Stoops, Allsopp Brewery’s newish pub on Kensington Church Street, for their second annual Game and Madeira Dinner, named after the site in Burton-on-Trent where Jamie’s ancestors first brewed Allsopp’s Ale in 1730. He sees similarities in the way the Madeira families and Allsopp’s had to work out how to…

Andrew Gimson writes this week’s diary on p7. He is a former deputy editor of The Spectator and the author of Gimson’s Heroes: Brief Lives from Boudicea to Churchill. Ralph Jones decries on p22 the bad poetry and laziness on the rise in children’s books. He is a writer and comedian based in Oxford. Charlotte Eagar, who writes about the plight of Iranian Christians on p28, is co-founder and producer of the Trojan Women Project. Ariane Banks is a publisher and the author of The Quality of Love. She reviews a new compilation of Albert Camus’s notebooks on p40. Alex Diggins, a writer and critic, visits Bukhara on p42 to find out if Uzbekistan’s art biennial has promise.…

Contemplating a new year always raises questions. Was there a Third Protocol? What was wrong with Oral-A? Can Keir Starmer survive 2026 as prime minister? It is the biggest question in politics this year and the fact that it does not have an easy answer illustrates the mess Starmer has got himself into over the past 18 months. A few days before Christmas, a senior figure in No. 10 outlined how Labour’s high command still believes the winds will change for the party in 2026: a ‘virtuous circle’ of falling interest rates and inflation, more investment, growth, and rising confidence in the government among the public and the Parliamentary Labour Party. Another Starmer loyalist noted the old adage: ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn.’ For a clear majority of Labour…

In July, Victoria, Lady Starmer was photographed at Royal Ascot, celebrating with friends after backing the winner of the Princess Margaret Stakes. Lady Starmer, whose grandmother lived near Doncaster racecourse, is a keen follower of flat racing, a passion she apparently shares with her husband. In 2024, the Prime Minister flew home from Washington D.C. to attend Doncaster’s St Leger meeting and told reporters: ‘There aren’t many better days out than the races in the sunshine.’ So it’s odd that Keir Starmer and his government appear to be doing all they can to kill off horse racing. Swingeing tax rises on the gambling industry, introduced in Rachel Reeves’s Budget, have left the sport, the second most attended in the UK, in a fight for its future. These short-sighted attacks on…

Erasmus in England The government is to rejoin the Erasmus scheme, which allows students at British universities to spend time studying in other European countries, with reciprocal opportunities for EU students. How did Desiderius Erasmus’s own studies in England go? — In 1499 he spent two months at St Mary’s College, Oxford, where he attended John Colet’s Bible classes and also learned skills in horsemanship. His trip ended in financial disaster, however, when customs officials confiscated his gold and silver while he was leaving England. — From 1511 to 1515 Erasmus was a Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, where he studied and taught Greek. But he was far from happy with his accommodation at Queens’ College, which he complained was cold and draughty. He also moaned that the college was…

There’s a myth that lots of us fall for/ ‘Kids’ books are so easy to write’/ And you can see why we might think so/ As so many of them are shite. Little poem by me there. As the dad of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, I have spent perhaps 100 hours reading some wonderful books, and hearing gorgeous books read to me. But parents everywhere will know what I mean when I say: Christ there’s a lot of dross out there. Why are so many children’s books so bad? While looking for kids’ books to name and shame for this piece, I realised that some of the very worst offenders are now in a charity shop or the bin. But plenty remain: rhyme schemes that evaporate into thin air;…

Apostasy – specifically, conversion to Christianity from Islam – is punishable by death in Iran. Suspected Christians are routinely imprisoned and tortured. Despite this, evangelical Christianity is sweeping through Iran. A 2020 survey of 50,000 Iranians conducted by a Dutch NGO, the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, suggests that there could be more than 1.2 million Christian converts. In a country with a population of 90 million, that’s a sizeable portion – and it’s growing fast. ‘It’s probably more like two million today,’ says Father Jonathan Samadi, founder of the Persian Anglican Community of London. ‘The numbers increase every year.’ Father Jonathan converted as a young man, having found a Farsi copy of the New Testament in a Tehran library. He fled Iran for Britain in 2009…

Frances Wilson finds Margaret Atwood’s settling of old scores thoroughly dispiriting Ian Sansom explores the strange afterlife of This is Spinal Tap Jim Lawley examines General Franco’s bloodstained legacy Alex Diggins wonders if he’s a useful idiot visiting Uzbekistan’s inaugural art biennial Lloyd Evans admires Tom Stoppard’s attempt to revise the accepted falsehood that the Brits were all racist psychos in India Richard Bratby witnesses a genuinely funny opera Deborah Ross needs help removing an earworm…

El Generalisimo Franco: Power, Violence and the Quest for Greatness by Giles Tremlett Bloomsbury, £30, pp. 528 General Franco died on 20 November 1975, and with the 50th anniversary just passed, this biography – the first in years – of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades is timely, incisive and authoritative. Written by a former Madrid correspondent of the Economist, it’s also an up to date and highly accessible introduction to 20th-century Spanish history. Born in 1892 into a middle-class family, Francisco Franco shared a bedroom with his younger brother Ramon, who later won international fame as Europe’s ‘equivalent of Charles Lindbergh’. There were few signs, however, that eminence also awaited Francisco. A weedy child, who dutifully got by at school, he had…

The Silver Book by Olivia LaingHamish Hamilton, £20, pp. 288 Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November. But at heart the book is a love story that follows the relationship between Danilo Donati – the costume…

You go here and go there, but also stand still,return to the same spots: the bench on the hillin Victoria Park, above the plane trees that veilthrough winter branches the city’s spill, platform seven, same-time Tuesdays, Temple Meadsgloomy and Cardiff central gleeful in sun,a table in the café waits, routinelywhere you sit, before work, as you’ve always done. You are running too, when you can, through early dark,sun lifting lazily over Ashton Court’s tree-lined hill,cross-country reps. Wednesdays, in Manor Woods Park,this New Year’s world breathes cautious, centred, still, those night walks home; Orion, seems the spindle,that turns time through January’s long chill.…

Tibetan Sky by Ning Ken, translated by Thomas Moran Sinoist Books, £16, pp. 413 We often forget to ascribe agency to modern Tibet. Politically, it seems to lie mute in the behemoth shadow of China. Culturally, we encounter it more as the backdrop to journeys of self-discovery than a producer of modern culture in its own right. But the villages of the Tibetan plateau are defiantly cosmopolitan in Ning Ken’s novel, the first by this important Chinese writer to be translated into English. Sardonic and erudite, it’s the only major literary treatment of Sino-Tibetan relations to appear in English in decades. The author belongs to the generation of such era-defining Chinese novelists as Mo Yan and Yan Lianke, publishing his first fiction in the heady days of reform and opening-up.…

Song Sung Blue 12A, Nationwide Song Sung Blue is a musical biopic of the real-life Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act and never hit the big time, or anywhere near. At its heart is a love story – one that is beautifully told. It stars Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, who is so sublime that we may even opt to forgive her for How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and similar. The only real downside is that it will leave you with an earworm of ‘Sweet Caroline’ (‘bom, bom, bom’) for the rest of your born days. A Hollywood biopic wouldn’t normally give such a couple the time of day so what’s the story? The story is that the filmmaker Greg Kohs was in Milwaukee working…

Maria, the boisterous new vizsla who gives the old one, Rocco, such a hard time, was in big trouble. She had killed one of our seven chickens, Gertrude, by biting her head off. Two of our six children – Caterina (22) and Rita (16) – wanted to dump Maria for good at the dog rescue centre immediately, or else take her back to the breeder we’d got her from in the hills. Giovanni Maria (14), who is able to identify each chicken and lets Giulia, his favourite, sit on his shoulder like a parrot, buried the dead Gertrude near where the tortoises used to live. He was gutted. Vizslas are a very fast, semi-aquatic, medium-sized breed of hunting dog, specialists in chasing game and waterfowl, and as such Maria does…

For Competition 3430 you were invited to write a rhyming prophecy for 2026. Joe Houlihan’s closing couplet encapsulates the tenor of the entry: Next year is like this year, but much, much worse: So take a stiff brandy and call for nurse. But while the mood was downbeat, the standard was cheering and the entries below earn their authors £25 John Lewis vouchers. Happy New Year, one and all. When you wake up in bed with a harrowing head and your brain is assaulted by bricks you’re beginning to mourn that you partied ’til dawn as you welcomed in Year ’26. The barometer’s falling, the cold is appalling, the sky is as dark as the devil, the rainfall is thudding and everywhere’s flooding, the rivers have burst past their level.…

I once stood in a queue behind a Scotsman checking out of a hotel in Germany. After he had finished scrutinising his bill in agonising detail, he demanded that it be reprinted, this time removing the €1 discretionary charge which had been added in support of the local homeless. More recently some friends of my daughter’s met a Yorkshire-born Spectator writer at a local fête. They mentioned the connection, expecting some mild pleasantries. Not so. ‘’Appen that reminds me: he still owes me for a taxi.’ When I heard this, I was bemused. Then I remembered I had indeed shared a taxi with the Yorkshireman in question, requesting a minor diversion to drop me off at Cannon Street. This, granted, would have added two quid to the overall fare. Point…

Everyone has been declaring which words are too rude to utter in public. Shortly after breakfast, Radio 4 happily discussed by name the book by Cory Doctorow called Enshittification. But on Radio 4’s Feedback it proved impossible to say the word that shocked some listeners when they heard it on a dramatisation of a work by Doris Lessing on Rhodesia in the 1940s. It had to be called the N-word. One formerly taboo word still does sterling service as an intensifier. Kate Winslet, on Desert Island Discs last month, said: ‘You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me.’ Bloody, said the OED when it came to address the word, was ‘now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people…

A traditional British Christmas is not complete until we have all enjoyed the seasonal cancellation of a celebrity, under the mistletoe. Excitement mounts during Advent as to who the luckless sap might be this year and then, on cue, the little cardboard door is at last opened and we all gather around the tree for a joyous hatefest. I was fairly happy with this year’s choice, the comedian and children’s author David Walliams, as there is something about his manner and that weird shiny moonface which has always slightly irritated me. He has been dropped by his publisher, HarperCollins, and the BBC has announced it has no plans to work with him in the future as a consequence of it being reported that he had harassed women at the publishing…

To walk out of a public performance before the end – be it the theatre, a concert or a lecture – is not the done thing. It’s considered an antisocial act that disrupts the performance and thus other people’s pleasure. To walk out provokes tuts of disapproval and scowls of indignation. And yet while it’s something we all disapprove of (at least in theory) it’s also something we all secretly long to do. Who hasn’t sat and squirmed in their seat at some tedious piece of theatre and wondered: how much more of this must I suffer? And who hasn’t been subjected to one of those long, sycophantic interviews with some self-adoring author flogging their latest book and not prayed for the courage to make a run for it? The…

What with the threat of global warming and nuclear war, the new year might start with a big bang. The Greeks were preoccupied with this possibility as well and called it the apocalypse (apokalupsis), meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revelation’. It has a long history behind it. The Greek farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) introduced the idea of a sequence of five ages – golden, silver, bronze, heroic, iron, each worse than the other – repeated five times and ending in total destruction. In his magnificent On the Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), who was an atomist, described how a world made of atoms would slowly decay and crumble into ruin – which he thought nature was doing in his own time – but would…

Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition. For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’ Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.’ Calling Jews ‘pigs and monkeys’,…

Man with man to dwell Sir: Your editorial (‘All ye faithful’, 13-27 December) suggests that scepticism about Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s (Tommy Robinson’s) Christian faith tends to coincide with credulity about conversions among refugees from Muslim-majority countries, and vice versa. This does not reflect the experience of many churches. Over the past year in our congregation, several young men have come to faith alongside a larger number of Iranian asylum seekers. One of the former was so affected by the murder of Charlie Kirk that he came to church the following Sunday. Many of the latter are sincerely seeking Christ, having become disillusioned with Islam in their homeland. These groups are not divided or suspicious of one another, but warmly united, and equally welcomed by the wider church. St Paul’s claim that…

The Two Roberts by Damian Barr Canongate, £18.99, pp. 320 For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they later lapsed into painful, drink-sodden obscurity. Damian Barr’s novel, The Two Roberts, is a tender and evocative act of resurrection. It portrays the men’s lives from the time of their first meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art to the moment in the mid-1950s when, penniless and out of fashion, they retreated to an ancient cottage in Suffolk. Meticulous in its verisimilitude, it is…

The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom University of Chicago Press, £36, pp. 648 To read Albert Camus’s Notebooks – comprehensive, newly translated and expertly annotated by Ryan Bloom – is to enter the engine room of the writer’s mind and to glimpse its complex workings and components stripped back to their essentials. They comprise an intellectual and spiritual autobiography, not an account of his life. But of course they contain seductive vignettes lifted straight from experience among the aphorisms, observations, drafts and schemas for writings, stitched together in a collage that reflects a remarkably agile mind in constant motion. The Notebooks bring to mind the fertile chaos of an artist’s studio. Think of Francis Bacon’s, filled with prompts and reminders, the raw rubble of everyday life,…

In the ruins of a 16th-century mosque, in the heart of the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara, dozens of abstract figures stand mute and motionless. As the desert sun dips below the horizon, and the shadows thicken, the effect is eerie. Wandering among the statues alone, you feel as though you’ve stumbled upon the aftermath of a forgotten, inscrutable rite. But these aren’t Ozymandian relics. They’re an artwork, ‘Close’, installed last summer by the British sculptor Antony Gormley. His work was one of more than 200 scattered across the Unesco World Heritage city as part of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, which ran from 5 September to 23 November last year. I was one of a handful of journalists invited out to see the closing ceremony of what was Uzbekistan’s first…

Malice Amazon Prime It’s like The White Lotus, only with all the fun removed Has anyone got to the end of Malice yet? I’m halfway through – at the time of writing, anyway – and am dearly hoping that I might bump into someone at a party who will blurt out all the plot details and spare me the misery of having to sit it out to the bitter end. The Fawn thinks I’m being a wuss, grumbling that I never used to be this squeamish about gory, psychologically harrowing torture-porn TV. Maybe so, but the older I get, the more I wonder: what am I actually gaining by spending six hours on a sofa writhing my way through a horrid story about a made-up psychopath doing terrible things to a…

L’amour des trois oranges Royal Northern College of Music Ariodante Royal Opera House ‘What we want is proper comedy!’ bellows the male chorus in the opening seconds of Prokofiev’s L’amour des trois oranges – in this case, a bevy of Monty Python bruisers in nylon frocks. The audience stirs. We’re being invaded by outsize schoolkids and what looks like a Scandinavian Eurovision entry, pushing through the stalls to the roars and whoops of a more-than-up-for-it student crowd. The previous night, I’d had four hours of manicured Handel and now a solo trombone was blowing raspberries in my face. ‘Stuff your tragedy! Take us out of ourselves!’ Yes, please! Do that. After prolonged exposure to da capo arias, a blast of raucous, multicoloured nonsense felt like shock therapy. And Mark Burns’s staging at…

We spent an hour in the Garda station trying to explain ourselves to a flame-haired police lady. She sat with her pen poised over a statement pad on the desk in the interview room. Her uniform was extremely smart and emblazoned with gold emblems. At least the police dress nicely here, I thought. The builder boyfriend shifted uncomfortably in his seat in the claustrophobic room and started explaining that he really didn’t want to press charges. But many weeks on from a crash in which a young driver crossed a solid white line to speed down the wrong side of the road and plough into the BB’s truck head on, demolishing it and his own car, the boy still hasn’t filled in any of the insurance forms admitting liability. The…

To 31D an 37A from the 29D 28A, 19A an 14A 1A and 11D a 23A 35D. Across Down A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 19 January. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2733, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. SOLUTION TO 2731: KNOTS ‘THE HORROR! THE HORROR!’ (4D/18A/3D) is a quotation from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, author of THE SECRET AGENT (9D). The protagonists are MARLOW (31D) and KURTZ (21A) and the tale was told in a YAWL (24A) called NELLIE (26D). Title: abbr. KN = heart of DARKNESS.…

Q. Around this time of year a successful friend likes to rent an expensive ski chalet with cook and fill it with friends. Guests pay for nothing except air fares and tips and he invariably invites me and my partner to join the house party. Regrettably, one thing does mar our enjoyment. Without exception, he always puts my partner and me in the worst room. We think he reasons that, since most of his guests are used to luxury and we are not, we will mind the worst room the least. But the fact is we love luxury too and would really enjoy an upgrade. We can’t think how to protest without seeming ungrateful and/or chippy, but can you see a solution, Mary? – W.B., London W5 A. You might…