Innholdsfortegnelse for 1 November 2025 i The Spectator

Javier Milei’s election in 2023 was a repudiation of decades of Peronist turmoil, corruption and inflation. Milei offered shock therapy, delivered with an Austin Powers haircut and chainsaws. This is a man who had worked as a tantric sex coach and claims to speak not just with animals but also with God himself. Eyebrows were raised. Could such a strange man, one who seems to embrace the new occultism outlined in our cover piece, deliver his promised reconstruction of Argentina? Or would voters soon grow tired of the state-slashing mystic? Yet this former frontman of a Rolling Stones tribute band has proved his sceptics wrong. He took office with inflation touching 200 per cent and acted decisively: deregulating the economy, cutting the public sector by 30 per cent, devaluing the…

The beautiful British actress Samantha Eggar has died in LA. I hope that will be the last in a spate of deaths among friends and celebrities in the past three months. First it was Terence Stamp, the handsome actor who starred with Samantha in The Collector, which made them both into stars. Then the legendary Robert Redford, whose many fabulous performances in exceptional movies make today’s film output look positively anaemic. The Way We Were, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting and Indecent Proposal are just a few of the brilliantly entertaining films he starred in. I met him only once, on a flight from New York to LA. He was charming, standing up from his first-class seat to exchange pleasantries. Also in the first-class compartment on that…

The British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proposed a ‘law of science’ in 1968: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ Clarke’s proposition had a quality of rightness, of stating the obvious with sparkling clarity, that propelled it into dictionaries of quotations. The timing was perfect: Concorde would soon be flying over rock festivals packed with hippies obsessed with ‘magick’. Naturally Clarke’s readers understood the difference between aerodynamics and sky gods. But African tribesmen gawping at an early aeroplane, or Pacific Islanders watching an atomic explosion, could only conclude that they were witnessing a supernatural event: for them, a scientific explanation was literally inconceivable. And one day scientists might perform feats so incredible that even educated westerners would fall back on religion or…

Sarah Pochin’s gonna take a lot of coachin’. You can’t just turn up on the telly and say you’re sick of all the blacks everywhere. And the Asians. Unaccountably, perhaps, you will be accused of racism, the definition of the term having been extended rather further than my interpretation: to discriminate against an individual on the grounds of his or her race. There will be outrage among the deluded; there will be faux outrage among the opportunistic. Your own party leader will slap you down by saying, in effect: ‘Well, she’s right, obvs, but you can’t say stuff like that.’ And her own leader is not wrong. The Overton window may have shifted but it hasn’t yet been smashed. Pochin’s words were, as Mr Farage put it, ‘ugly’, although I…

Britain is beset by a bogeyman. A giant, mystical beast that the public are forever being threatened with. Remember last year when a young Welsh choirboy stabbed three young girls to death at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party in Southport? Long before we were allowed to know the name of the culprit – Axel Rudakubana – we were warned about a much greater menace: a rallying by the ‘far right’. After impromptu protests and some rioting broke out in various cities, we were promised on an hourly basis that the ‘far right’ was mobilising. Soon there were crowds of Muslim men organising to counter any such threat. Nick Lowles, of the wrongly named ‘anti-racist’ group Hope Not Hate, helped to whip things up by wrongly claiming that a Muslim woman…

Aside from streaming on an iPad, one of the few entertainments on offer when riding a stationary bike is tracking your heart rate. Breaking 150 beats per minute provides a fleeting (and doubtless misplaced) sense of achievement. Yet the wearable heart monitor that came with my exercise bicycle proved unreliable; one’s BPM never truly drops from 137 to 69 in one second. This is to explain why I bought the fitness freak’s fetish: an Apple watch. Its heart-rate monitors are accurate. I opted for a reconditioned older model, not only half the price of the new ones but inclusive of the blood oximeter function, which a medical technology suit has forced Apple to eliminate in current American models until the litigant’s patent runs out in 2028. I’d never much cared…

Future proof Sir: Douglas Murray asks why Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech understated the problems (‘Imagine what Enoch Powell might have said’, 25 October). The simple answer is that it couldn’t have said everything, but many of the omissions cited are referred to in Powell’s later speeches. During the 1970 general election campaign in Birmingham, for instance, Powell noted that ‘this country is today under attack by forces which aim at the actual destruction of our nation and society as we know or can imagine them’. He gave many examples of a ‘new psychological weaponry’ rendering the majority ‘passive and helpless’ by asserting ‘manifest absurdities as if they were self-evident truths’. Most important of all, he referred to the ‘exploitation of what is called “race” as a common factor’…

Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life by Gerri Kimber Reaktion, £20, pp. 336 Katherine Mansfield refused to be pinned down. Aged 17, she told a friend she planned to lead ‘all sorts of lives’, already chafing at the limitations of her parents’ bourgeois world. She warned her first lover that she liked ‘always to have a great grip of life, so that I intensify the so-called small things – so that truly everything is significant’. Living, to Mansfield, was a challenge to be confronted head-on, a restless and active process of ‘shedding and renewing’. Her passion for life fortified her through a horrifying succession of troubles. It fed her art; it also exhausted her. ‘Life’, in its most capacious sense, is the subject of Mansfield’s fiction. As Gerri Kimber writes in her…

Fateful Hours: The Collapse of the Weimar Republicby Volker Ullrich, translated by Jefferson ChasePushkin Press, £25, pp. 384 ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again,’ warned the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, explaining why witnesses to the horrors of Nazism and genocide must be listened to, and why it is important for future generations to stay vigilant against a repeat of such atrocities. The underlying assumption is that the Nazis’ rise to power and the terrible crimes that followed were preventable. We believe that German democracy need not have died; that Hitler could have been stopped from plunging much of the world into a horrific war and from eradicating the vast majority of European Jews. Yet, despite the widespread conviction that studying these events inoculates future generations against totalitarian ideologies, historians…

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970sby Jason Burke Bodley Head, £30, pp. 692 At the end of the 1970s, the Illustrated London News printed a special edition to commemorate the decade. What did it focus on? Music, from David Bowie to Bob Marley? Some of the best films Hollywood has ever produced, from The Godfather on? Political crises, such as Watergate and the end of the war in Vietnam? No, there was only one headline: ‘The 1970s: The Years of Terrorism.’ We forget – and perhaps we want to – quite how brutal and random that time could be, with plane hijackings, the Munich Olympics atrocity and bombs going off from the Tower of London to Washington to Singapore, where the Japanese Red Army caused…

With his three-piece suits, poodle hairdo and bizarrely bendy physique, Tom Gilbey looks like he was created in a secret laboratory beneath the streets of Turnham Green by the Wine Marketing Board. But I have it on good authority that he is a real person. Gilbey came to prominence last year as the self-styled ‘wine wanker’ who ran the London marathon, stopping every mile to taste a wine blind and guessing most of them right. Now we have the inevitable book; and while Gilbey isn’t an elegant prose stylist in the manner of Oz Clarke, Thirsty: 100 Great Wines and Stories (Square Peg, £20) is an enormously entertaining read. It’s part memoir, part guide to wine. The author comes from wine royalty. Gilbeys was one of the first companies to…

The Assembled PartiesHampstead Theatre, until 22 November Little BrotherSoho Theatre, until 22 November The Assembled Parties, by Richard Greenberg, is a rich, warm family comedy that received three Tony nominations in 2013 following its New York première. Hampstead has taken a slight risk with this revival. The cryptic title doesn’t suggest an easygoing drama full of excellent jokes. The Yiddish slang may be unfamiliar to English ears, and the social pedigree of the family needs explanation. These are wealthy New York Jews living in a 14-room apartment which they rent but don’t own, so their fortune is insecurely anchored. And the action starts in 1980 and fast-forwards to 2000 so it feels like a period piece aimed at the over-sixties. Those drawbacks aside, the show is a sensation. Greenberg centres…

Hanging a pair of gates at the rear of the house gave us so much satisfaction, it suddenly seemed strange that we had waited so long to do it. When we first moved here, I fell so in love with the place, and was so lost in a dream about rural Ireland, that I left the back of the property ungated, even though the rear of the house almost adjoins a small public road. Not a road, a boreen. A lovely little lane with grass down the middle. What possible hostility could occur on that? I was enjoying such naive notions about how relaxed our existence was going to be that I completely overlooked the fact that people are the same wherever you go. I should have known never to…

It has been a gratifyingly wine-soaked week. Our Pol Roger-fuelled dinner celebrating the mighty Michael Heath’s 90th birthday was followed by a brace of Spectator Winemaker Lunches, one featuring Marimar Torres’s sublime Sonoma Pinots and Chardonnays, the other, at Boisdale, focusing on the glory that is Lebanon’s Ch. Ksara. Fearing toxic shock if I stopped, I continued my vinous operations with an extensive tasting with Armit Wines for this offer. As always, it was tricky to narrow down the choices, hence eight rather than six wines. I don’t think we’ve offered a Slovenian wine before but the 2021 Marinic Ribolla Gialla (1) certainly merits inclusion. From an organically farmed, all-but-biodynamic estate in the Brda Hills near the Italian border, it’s made from 100 per cent Ribolla Gialla (no, nor me,…

Arabella Byrne investigates the world of middle-class witches on p11. She is the co-author of In The Blood: On Mothers, Daughters and Addiction. Daniel McCarthy, who on p20 warns Donald Trump against backing regime change in Venezuela, is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. Francesca Wade, who writes about Katherine Mansfield on p35, is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars. Sarah Ditum, who lifts the lid on bunny-boilers on p39, is the author of Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties. Katja Hoyer is a writer and historian whose most recent book is Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990. She explores the resistible rise of Nazism on p40.…

JAMES HEALE He helped ‘break’ the Bank of England – but now Scott Bessent is helping to shape its future. As a young hedge-fund manager, he served in George Soros’s firm when it made $1 billion on Black Wednesday. But as Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, he has overseen an explosion in cryptocurrencies this year which has left many in London looking on enviously. While the use of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin has trebled in Britain since 2021, this country’s governing framework has struggled to keep up. A shortage of political bandwidth has meant the UK lacks a national equivalent to Europe’s MiCA rules or America’s Genius Act, passed in July. Our policy is moulded by a trio of the Bank, the Treasury and the Financial Conduct Authority. All have commissioned…

In King James VI of Scotland’s Daemonologie, written in 1597, he vigorously encourages witch-hunting and, in particular, the tossing of witches into the sea. Only the innocent would sink. As a way of identifying witches, it was clear and presumably efficient. These days, we have no such clarity. But witches walk among us. I’m not talking about women in black pointy hats, but something far scarier: the middle-class witch. In the past, she might have been called a depressive, a spinster or a divorcée. Now, she’s probably a middle-aged woman in the Home Counties with a TikTok account, a litany of spells and deep trauma. Modern witchcraft has always invited confusing cliches. Blame L. Frank Baum. His links to the early feminist movement via his mother-in-law, women’s rights activist Matilda…

On the day of the local elections in May, when the Tories suffered a historic setback, Kemi Badenoch went to the gym and got her hair done. A screenshot of the Tory leader’s diary, leaked by a disgruntled Conservative, shows she planned a Harley Street dental appointment at 9 a.m., followed by 90 minutes at the Cat N’Cow pilates gym at 11 a.m., followed by an hour-long visit to hairdresser George Northwood at 1 p.m. Plenty of politicians take it easy on election day, but the leak is significant because it shows someone still wants to wound her. For her internal enemies, she remains on probation. ‘Thousands of loyal Conservative party activists went out that morning in a desperate attempt to door-knock voters,’ an internal critic charged. ‘Meanwhile, their leader…

When I joined The Spectator, the office was in Bloomsbury, in a four-storey Georgian house, and the further down the building you went, the more stylish, the more Spectator (I thought), everything became. On the top floor, blinds drawn, sitting in the half-dark, was Kimberly Fortier, the American publisher, often in long meetings with media alpha males. She was married to the publisher Stephen Quinn and having an affair with the home secretary, David Blunkett, but was always looking to widen her portfolio. One floor down was Boris Johnson, then editor, mostly immersed in meetings of his own with assistant editor Petronella Wyatt. We’d sometimes find him on the landing, staring mistily into the middle distance. ‘Petsy looks like a Bond girl. Doesn’t she look like a Bond girl?’ he’d…

In a radio discussion of the Renters’ Rights Act which passed into law this week, I heard ‘Britain’s housing emergency’ referred to as a given fact. If that’s so, then the housebuilders who create supply and feed home-owning aspirations ought to be public, political and stock-market heroes. But they’re not – and it’s worth asking why such an essential sector has fallen so far out of favour. Think back to Sir Lawrie Barratt, who built 300,000 houses and achieved fame with 1980s television ads featuring a strong-jawed actor as Barratt himself arriving by helicopter to inspect the latest show house. Less well known was Duncan Davidson, the swashbuckling grandson of a duke who died last month: he founded Persimmon in 1972, peppered the country with its new estates and took…

Impossible Creatures: The Poisoned Kingby Katherine Rundell Bloomsbury, £14.99, pp. 336 You wait ages for an intelligent, literate children’s book, then two come along at once. There’s Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field and Katherine Rundell’s The Poisoned King. Of the two, Rundell’s is easier on the wrist: 336 pages to Pullman’s 621. She is an accomplished writer, the author of a study of John Donne. A scholarly background is all to the good here, for she has a treasure chest of myths and stories to rummage in. Her Impossible Creatures series (of which The Poisoned King is the second) is based on an archipelago, Glimouria, which holds the endangered creatures of mythology. A map of the islands, in Tomislav Tomic’s illustration, is faintly reminiscent of Pauline Baynes. In the bestiary…

Dead and Alive: Essaysby Zadie SmithHamish Hamilton, £22, pp. 335 Zadie Smith was born in 1975 in the UK to a Jamaican mother and a British father, and grew up in the ethnically multi-shaded London borough of Brent. Her novels and essays often conjure the polyglot confusion and vibrant streetscapes of Willesden in north-west London where she went to school. Dead and Alive takes us from her beloved Kilburn High Road (Afro-wig emporia, pound shops) to an appreciation of a Stormzy concert at Glastonbury. This fourth essay collection is unfailingly interesting: Smith is uniquely placed to chart the vagaries of life in mixed-up, mixed-race Britain. Some of the greatest essayists of the 20th century were American. (Only a wordy journal such as the New Yorker could accommodate the long stroll,…

After the disappointmentof the confit de canardand the ‘no shows’of those I’d planned to see a face looms up rightat the death, whale-likewith shy pinprick eyesand then all in a rush just as the taxis arriveI’m being told memoryis vivid even thoughhis House had been Queen’s mine Marryott and thatI’d been good at sport,he hopeless. Fifty years onhe still recalls our earnest talk of books. Yet of himmy file is a guilty blank,shows nothing of the Germanboy whose parents thought a year in England woulddo him good. Oddly, I startto well — that senseof life as ledger what gainedwhat lost, implacableas the summonsof a schooltime bell.…

Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Readingby Robert Douglas-Fairhurst Fern Press, £20, pp. 352 Few readers can claim to be what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called ‘Mogul diamonds’ – those who not only ‘profit by what they read’, but ‘enable others to profit by it also’. If such people were rare in Coleridge’s time, then today, when reading is in dramatic decline, they are scarce enough that even the white rhino might feel a little smug. Anyone seeking a glimpse of this endangered reader could be forgiven for thinking that a university English department was its most likely habitat, but they would be wrong. Behind the brown office doors where academics labour, one is more likely to find the common squirrel, hoarding information and burying it under dense soil.…

The last Yana-speaker in the world died in 1916. When Ishi was born, the Yana were still a small but healthy collection of tribes ranging the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, where they lived off what they could hunt and the salmon they caught in the rivers. But gold had been discovered in California and every year tens of thousands of settlers were arriving to stake out a claim. When Ishi was four years old, there was a massacre of Yana people near what’s now Mill Creek; Ishi’s father was one of the people killed. The last few survivors disappeared into the hills. The white settlers never encountered them again; as far as they knew the Yana had been wiped out. Forty-four years later, Ishi wandered out of the mountains,…

Down Cemetery RoadApple TV+ Mortimer and Whitehouse: Gone FishingBBC2 If you didn’t already know that Down Cemetery Road was based on a novel Mick Herron wrote before the Slough House series – later adapted into TV’s Slow Horses – it mightn’t be too difficult to guess. After all, main character Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson, no less) is a cynical sixtysomething with a dodgy hygiene regime, who works in a ferociously shabby office and communicates mainly through the medium of the heartless yet undeniably funny wisecrack – but who nonetheless shouldn’t be underestimated by the arse-covering intelligence services she’s up against. She is, in other words, a female version of Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb (also played by an Oscar-winning Brit). Unlike Lamb, however, Zoë isn’t a spook herself, but a private…

If only the Northern line could get its act together. Last week saw further buffing of its reputation as the ‘Misery line’, with signalling problems that disrupted journeys for days and kept engineers baffled. But it could all be so different. The Northern could be famous for having the deepest station (Hampstead, 192ft), the highest point above ground level (the Dollis Brook viaduct, where the line runs 59ft above the road) and indeed the final station when the whole network is listed alphabetically (Woodside Park). It also has the only station with a single-syllable name. I’ll leave you to work that one out. Clue: it’s not, as someone once suggested to me, Oval. In fairness, the line’s delays have sometimes been for more charming reasons. In 1946 a dog trotted…

We were in beautiful bush country up towards Somalia, in pastures that shone like spun gold in the sunset as herds of Boran cattle came into the bomas to suckle their calves. My hosts, Ogadeni clan stockmen who had invited me to travel here to look at their herds, showed me their favourite animals and then went off to pray, as hundreds of cows lay down to chew the cud. After prayers came a supper in jugs of frothing warm milk. In return, the herders accepted the bundles of qat leaves I had brought as a present for us all to chew. We became a little stoned on the qat and conversation flowed, entirely about livestock. I passed around photos of my famous Boran heifer, who had won Reserve Champion…

Tributes have poured in for Daniel Naroditsky, the American grandmaster who has died suddenly at the age of 29. Those who knew him best told of his kindness and humility. He once noted that his favourite saying about chess was this: ‘At the end of the game, both the king and the pawn go into the same box.’ That ethos made Naroditsky one of the game’s most popular commentators, with over half a million followers on YouTube. ‘Danya’ was both a precocious student and a gifted teacher. He published his first chess book (Mastering Positional Chess) when he was just 14 and went on to study history at Stanford. His online content, far more than most, was consistently edifying, and always delivered with a sense of humour and his trademark…

They say never meet your heroes, but Bernard Cornwell didn’t disappoint. Knowing I’m a superfan, the events team at The Spectator asked me to interview him on stage on Monday and he was everything you could hope for: funny, candid, clever. The default register of very successful people in my experience is insincere modesty, but Cornwell was something different – falsely immodest. That is to say, there were moments when he blew his own trumpet, but in a way clearly intended to be ironic. The lasting impression was of someone completely at ease with his achievements – not puffed up, but justifiably proud. Few authors can match Cornwell’s accomplishments. He was in London to promote Sharpe’s Storm, the latest addition to his 25-volume series featuring Richard Sharpe, an English rifleman…

Q. Some friends of ours have an amazing house on the coast in Kenya. Every time we see them they are guaranteed to say ‘You must come to stay, you’d love it’ or something similar. No dates are ever forthcoming but we have decided we’d actually quite like to go this winter. How can we tie them down without making them feel pressurised by our having suggested dates? – Name and address withheld A. Choose the dates which suit you, then contact them to say you are thinking of going to, for example, Tanzania, or other likely adjacent spot around that time. Is there any chance you could come to stay either before or afterwards? In this way they will feel much less responsible for your having a great time…

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: ‘I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.’ She has so far made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. ‘She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,’ wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual ‘grooming’? Are they victims or survivors? Or should they be neither? Last week, after he withdrew his name for consideration as the…

As others, including Nigel Farage, were quick to point out, Sarah Pochin got it wrong. She uttered words which, shorn of their context (as they obviously would be), made her sound racist. But the almost compulsory use of persons of colour to promote products and services is a bit of a wonder of the world. Modernisers often speak of the need for institutions to ‘look like Britain as it is’ (depressing thought), but this seems not to apply on screen. In the style of Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, I offer a definition of the phrase ‘television ads’, as follows: ‘Short filmic fictions about the blissful and virtuous lives of persons of mixed race or with non-white skin.’ I have written elsewhere about how the RedBird Capital bid to buy the…

In his youth in the early 2000s, Emil Lundin became obsessed with the idea of recording the world’s ‘most evil album’. The lanky, long-haired Swede formed a black metal band and set to work. He faced an immediate obstacle. In making history’s most nefarious musical creation, he could hardly use Swedish, with its sing-song tones. English was also out of the question: he didn’t want to sound like Abba. That left Latin, the native tongue of the occult and, it is said, of demons. In a quest for suitably devilish lyrics, he pored over arcane texts. That led him to Latin editions of Sayings of the Desert Fathers – bad-ass early Christian monks – and St Augustine’s Confessions. Before he knew it, he was sleeping on a concrete floor, rising…

Architects are thrilled about AI, confident that it will take us into an exciting new world at the flick of a switch. The Roman architect Vitruvius begins his ten-book De architectura (c. 25 BC) by describing an architect’s education. Craftsmanship – continuous and familiar practice – must go hand in hand with theoretical skill and method. He must be a man of letters so that he can draw on precedents; proficient in drawing and geometry; and a master of rule and compass. Optics will teach him how to use the sun to best effect in lighting rooms. He must also be good at arithmetic to cost his buildings. He must be a historian, to explain why columns and ornaments look as they do, and a philosopher, high-minded, urbane, cherishing a…

Few Americans find much to celebrate in the Iraq War or the intervention in Libya. Regimes were successfully changed, but what came after Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi was civil war, regional instability and mass migration that exported many of those nations’ troubles to their neighbours. Now the Donald Trump administration wants to do to Venezuela’s despot, Nicolas Maduro, what George W. Bush did to Saddam and Barack Obama did to Gaddafi. But that will also do to the Americas, including the United States, what the war on terror did to the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. The foreign policy blunders of Bush and Obama gave Trump one of his strongest campaign themes in 2016. His first term was distinguished by his success at keeping America out of new…

Do you know how much faeces 30 dogs can produce over a couple of years? I have some idea because I recently helped my mother regain access to the small cottage adjoining her house, after she had rented it out to a nightmare tenant who caused incalculable damage. It took nine months to evict the tenant after she stopped paying rent, having already been in considerable arrears. Reclaiming the property proved onerous and expensive, involving legal instruction and eventually High Court enforcement. Upon finally entering with enforcement officers, some of us retched. We found half an inch of dog mess all over the floor and smeared across walls; empty bottles; an infestation of fleas, rats and every kind of rubbish. The stench was indescribable. The tenant had carefully slashed any…

Paul Poiret: Inventing Modern Luxuryby Mary E. Davis Reaktion Books, £25, pp. 320 Such was Paul Poiret’s influence that he is the only couturier whose clothes are known to have caused several fatal accidents. At a time (1910-11) when fashion was loosening up he persuaded chic women into the hobble skirt, a garment so narrow round the ankles that only tiny, mincing steps were possible, with the result that several tripped over when stepping down from a pavement and one toppled from a bridge into a river where, unable to swim from the constriction around her ankles, she drowned. In Mary E. Davis’s book, however, this dangerous garment gets only a brief mention. Instead, what we have is not so much a biography as a well-illustrated study of this extraordinary…

Surf’s Up: Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys by Peter DoggettNew Modern, £25, pp. 400 Film noir was the term coined by the French in the late 1940s to describe the genre of Hollywood crime movies which probed the darkness that lay in the shadows cast by all that bright Californian sunlight. The Beach Boys, who broke through in the early 1960s with a repertoire that hymned, in five-part harmonies, the Golden State’s promise of sun, sand and waves, bronzed bodies, beach-party ‘babes’, hot rods and open highways, were – and remain – the quintessential Californian band. But their story, an unhappy family saga featuring the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis) and cousin Mike Love, is, like that of California’s itself, as dark as it is light. Their presiding…

The White Lady: The Story of Two British Secret Service Networks Behind German Linesby Helen FryYale, £20, pp. 282 We are familiar with the myths and realities of French resistance and German occupation, but less so with the story of Belgian resistance. It was highly creditable, spanning both world wars, and has long deserved to be better known. This book should help ensure that it is. The title refers to the legend of the White Lady – la Dame Blanche – whose appearance was said to herald the downfall of the Hohenzollerns, the Kaiser’s dynasty. The name was adopted by a network of 1,084 Belgians who spied for MI6 against the country’s German occupiers during the first world war. According to MI6’s authorised history, this ‘became the most successful single…

L’heure espagnole/The BearTheatre Royal Glasgow, and at Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, on Saturday 15 November Albert HerringThe Lowry, Salford Ravel’s L’heure espagnole is set in a clockmaker’s shop and the first thing you hear is ticking and chiming. It’s not just a sound effect; with Ravel, it never is. He was an inventor’s son, half-Swiss, half-Basque, and timepieces, toys and Dresden figurines were in his soul. For Ravel, they seem to have possessed souls in their own right. ‘Does it not occur to people that one may be artificial by nature?’ he remarked, and few artists have shown such tenderness towards these small, lovingly made things that strive so tirelessly, and so hopelessly, to be alive. So that was something to think about, as Alexandra Cravero conducted the opening bars of…

The Code; www.RachelOrmont.comDeeper Into Movies at the Ivy House I can’t watch films anymore without looking at my phone. If I watch a film on my laptop, I’ll be scrolling throughout – reading Wikipedia, checking group chats, looking up filming locations on IMDb. To properly watch a film, I have to take myself to the cinema. Luckily, and perhaps as a direct result of our scrolling habits, London’s indie cinema scene is having an ascendent moment. I recently ventured down to Peckham for two screenings at the Ivy House, a pub with a cinema room where films play on a stained pull-down projection screen. Both screenings were organised by Deeper Into Movies, which puts on arthouse films at cinemas across London. Celine posts TikTok videos (username: inceline) of herself spiking…

Gillian Welch and David RawlingsLondon Palladium Amyl and the SniffersAlexandra Palace, until 15 November The last time Gillian Welch and David Rawlings played in London it was a different world: the world of David Cameron and Barack Obama and a Manchester United at the top of the Premier League. Welch and Rawlings have changed, too: Welch is silver rather than red, and Rawlings as grizzled as a bear. Welch was in brown floor-length dress and Rawlings in suede jacket and cowboy hat. With a rather younger upright-bass-player, Paul Kowert, the trio looked like farmers trying to save their land from The Man in some Taylor Sheridan TV series. And then they started singing. Welch and Rawlings have released records under their own names and as a pairing. But they always…

The flight from Nice to Bristol was packed. As soon as the doors closed I spotted a hummingbird hawk-moth bumping about the lights beside the overhead lockers. Poor thing. I often see them on my little terrace, wings a blur, freakishly long proboscis burrowing deep into the flowers. A woman with a steely bob a few rows in front jabbed at it with her inflight magazine and when the creature landed at her feet stamped it to dust, saying loudly to the people around her: ‘You’re all safe now!’ The lady beside me, a hospital cleaner from Liverpool, clenched her fist. I had three hours to wait before the connecting flight to Glasgow and looking around the airport I noticed that everyone was weirdly fit – ripped even. Folk were…

They say not to judge a book by its cover – but what about judging a recipe by its name? Some sound like a disease or worse. Spotted dick, toad in the hole, lady’s fingers, Dutch baby, I’m looking at all of you. Cullen skink is one that has been accused of having an off-putting name. But in its defence, Cullen skink is descriptive. There’s a suggestion that the word ‘skink’ comes from an Old German word for ‘beer’ or ‘essence’, but given that Cullen skink is a creamy, thick soup, with no beer constituent and no obvious German connection, this seems an unlikely origin. More plausible is the explanation the Oxford Companion to Food plumps for, that ‘skink’ is a Scots word for ‘shin’ or ‘knuckle’, which became a…

Comp. 3423 invited you to submit a passage about a command or suggestion from literature being taken too literally. I was sorry not to squeeze in Alan Millard’s riff on John Donne’s ‘Go and Catch a Falling Star’: ‘The object in question can reach temperatures of almost 3,000˚F when entering the Earth’s atmosphere…’. A popular choice was ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be’; nods to Elizabeth Kay, Nicholas Lee, Simon Godziek, Max Ross. Other runners-up: Joseph Houlihan’s ‘If’-inspired story of someone risking everything on a turn of pitch-and-toss at Caesar’s Palace; Tracy Davidson’s ‘Bring me my bow of burning gold’ leading to disaster at the White House; Brian Murdoch’s pedantic querying of the wisdom of ‘Now let us sport us while we may’; Jeremy Carlisle’s gory soliloquy following the…

A femtosecond, derived from the Danish word femte meaning ‘fifteen’, is a unit of time in the International System of Units equal to 10-15 or 1⁄1,000,000,000,000,000 of a second; in other words one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. A femtosecond is to a second as a second is to approximately 31.69 million years. Similarly, a femmosecond, from the French femme meaning ‘wife’, is a slightly briefer unit of time equivalent to the twinkling of an eye. It defines the imperceptibly fleeting interval between my wife saying ‘Rory, why on earth have you bought another portable charger?’ and my wife saying ‘Rory, could I borrow your portable charger?’ I am obsessed with portable chargers. In fact the greatest threat to my financial wellbeing is not gambling,…

There is a fellow called Anthony Newman who is fascinated by drink, as a consumer, a producer and an intellectual. That said, he spent some years supplying Australians with craft beer, which does not sound very intellectual. But he insists he paid for his own passage and was able to return without a ticket of leave. While living in Oz he visited Japan, and found himself captivated by many aspects – not least sake, the rice wine which is its national drink. Nearly 90 per cent of sake is consumed locally. Anthony decided the potential export market was enormous. I have heard it persuasively argued that Japan is the most complex of all the world’s great countries. It does certainly seem true that despite so many western elements in Japanese…