Table of contents for 4 October 2025 in The Spectator

Questions of identity permeate our politics. What is it to be English, to be British? The Prime Minister sought to reclaim patriotism for the left in his conference speech, but his invocation of football stadium flag-waving and Oasis swagger was a remix of Britpop themes which were tinnily jarring two decades ago and beyond tired today. It was karaoke Cool Britannia. A much more thoughtful consideration of what modern patriotism requires, and where the dangers in an exclusively ethnic approach to national loyalty lie, came from the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. In both her conference speech and her comments at a fringe meeting with The Spectator, Mahmood navigated questions of faith and flag with a candour and willingness to challenge the simplicities of both simple-minded left and hard-hearted right which…

There was a time when the serious business of concert-giving closed down for the summer. Artists were expected to take time off – to rest, to fish, to learn repertoire. But now many of the most important musical events happen during the resting, fishing months, not least the BBC Proms. This year I was determined that vacation should mean just that, as I swapped the stage for the stalls, from Janacek’s Katya Kabanova at Glyndebourne to Top Hat at Chichester to Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican. It was an idyllic break, but it’s back to work. My new season began in New York, a second home since 1981 when I was a student at the Juilliard School, where I now have one student. On the day I arrived I…

It is almost a century since Ronald Knox wrote his ‘Ten Commandments’ for detective fiction. Most of them still hold true. For example, his edict that twin brothers and other lookalikes must not be introduced to the story unless the reader has been prepared for them. Also the forbidding of more than one secret passageway or room in any story and the insistence that the sidekick, Dr Watson-like figure should never keep a thought to himself, while having thoughts slightly below the anticipated intelligence of the average reader. My favourite rule is number five. ‘No Chinaman must figure in the story.’ In reality this is an extension of rule one, which holds that the criminal must be someone who has appeared early in the story. In other words, at no…

The European Union, guardian and champion of democracy, rightly takes a dim view when ruling parties ban their opponents, refuse to open polling stations in areas likely to vote against them, censor opposition news channels and allow a large staff of foreign election monitors to police social media in the run-up. If Serbia, say, or Georgia tried systematic election rigging of this kind, Brussels would be the first to call foul and disregard the result as illegitimate. But when it’s the EU that’s running the interference, as in Moldova this week, the rules are apparently quite different. This week the pro-EU party of Maia Sandu, Moldova’s President and a former World Bank official, won a slim majority in a general election. Her main opponent was Igor Dodon, who led a…

Colossal, a $10 billion biotech firm with a knack of grabbing headlines, has announced it is on the way to de-extinguishing the dodo, the very icon of extinction. Like most of Colossal’s announcements, this one included a hefty helping of hype. All the firm’s scientists have actually done on this occasion is prove they can grow primordial germ cells of pigeons, one of many necessary steps – and not the hardest one – in reviving the fat and flightless bird of the pigeon family of Mauritius that was the dodo. In a couple of years, Ben Lamm, who runs the company, will probably present us with a fat and flightless pigeon with a funny beak and say: ‘Look, a dodo!’ That’s roughly what he did last year when he made…

Finally, some good news from Oxford. The university has recently been through a gloomy patch. It slipped from the top three in UK rankings for the first time since records began. The Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, also shamed the institution by gloating over the murder of Charlie Kirk. However, the university’s classicists are bringing light into the darkness. Dons at four colleges – Jesus, Harris Manchester, Brasenose and Queen’s – are engaged in an extraordinary initiative that is widening access to the subject, improving standards and bringing back a Renaissance spirit to the study of ancient languages. In short, they have started to teach their students to speak Latin and Ancient Greek. This idea may seem eccentric. Scholars centuries ago – Erasmus, Elizabeth I – might have chattered in…

The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People’s History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet Hutchinson Heinemann, £25, pp. 352 No one who flies into Afghanistan’s capital is left indifferent. In one of the many deftly drawn scenes in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, Lyse Doucet describes a snowy Hindu Kush on the skyline, the packed homes of the poor on the brown hills, a steep corkscrew descent carried out while firing flares, ‘bursting outward with white-hot fire’ to avoid missiles. Once safely on the ground, she decides to make her way to Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, drawn by ‘better telephone and telex links, food worth eating and a certain faded splendour’. Doucet, a deservedly respected journalist who is now the BBC’s chief international correspondent, made that first trip in the winter of…

Night People: How to be a DJ in ‘90s New York by Mark Ronson Century, £25, pp. 256 Mark Ronson has one of the finest heads of hair in all showbusiness. The music producer’s coiffure is a dark, whipped and quiffed thing that makes it look as though he naturally belongs on a Vespa in Capri, being ogled by the belle ragazze as he scoots on by. As a cultural object, it certainly surpasses the Oscar he won for the songs in that Lady Gaga remake of A Star is Born; it probably equals his Barbie soundtrack; and maybe even approaches the hits he made with and for Amy Winehouse. But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the 1990s, Ronson’s hair was a standard-issue crop, while he was a…

Clarkston Trafalgar Theatre, until 22 November Get Down Tonight: The KC and the Sunshine Band Musical Charing Cross Theatre, until 15 November Clarkston is an American-backed production featuring a Netflix star, Joe Locke. He plays a young graduate with a terminal illness, Jake, who works at a Costco warehouse in a failing midwest town. Jake is a brainbox with an IQ of 140 who takes a scholarly interest in early American history. On his first day at work, he befriends a bookish intellectual, Chris, who loves literature and wants to dazzle the world with his fiction. The entry requirements for this branch of Costco seem to be tougher than Harvard’s. The romance between the two boys is impeded by Jake’s clingy mum, Trisha, who feeds her meth habit by stealing…

How to react to Nigel Farage’s suggestion that immigrants are killing and eating swans? You can react like LBC’s Iain Dale, who said that ‘Reform UK might have peaked in the polls’. You can react like Times Radio’s Adam Boulton, who said that Farage was ‘in danger’ of repelling voters by ‘copying memes’ from Donald Trump. You can react like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns, who said that swan eating was a ‘serious issue’. Or you can think, as I did: ‘Mmm, I wonder what swan tastes like.’ ‘Quite fishy’ is the surprising answer. I don’t know that from experience, but because of Americans, who can eat swan but choose not to. You would expect swan to taste like goose – gamey and fatty – but, apparently, it’s disgusting unless you kill…

Cradle of Mankind Paleoanthropologists tried to kill me a few days ago. Luckily I was saved by Max Mutkin, a young Londoner who had come along with me to track down a Neolithic monument in Kenya’s searing-hot northern deserts. Our guide was B––, a local man I’d been assured ‘knows everything there is to know’. We were aiming for the shores of Lake Turkana, known the Jade Sea, and in that vicinity I’d heard there was a site where people had erected a little Stonehenge 5,000 years ago. En route Max regaled me with stories of what it was like to be at university during Covid, and life ahead in his barrister’s pupillage. After driving through remote wastes, we came to the foot of a red mountain, got out of…

Our two Spectator Clays, Claret, Cognac, Cigars (and Carnage) Cruises down the Thames last week were an uproarious success. Much fun was had and, apart from a couple of walking wounded – suffering not from gunshot wounds, you’ll be glad to hear, but simply a surfeit of claret and kummel – there were no casualties. Besides, our plucky pair soon revived after a pint or so at our temporary dressing station in The Dickens Inn. Our long-term partners for the cruises, Private Cellar, did us proud, supplying some stunning clarets, introduced by winemaker extraordinaire, Jean-Michel Garcion, hot-foot, mid-harvest, from Bordeaux. We drank our fill, topping things off nicely with a magnum of Mentzendorff Kummel, a double magnum of Delamain Pale & Dry XO Cognac and some fine Nicaraguan cigars as…

Stephen Hough, who writes this week’s Diary on p9, is a classical pianist and composer who has produced more than 60 albums. David Shipley is a former prison inmate, and writes about what Nicolas Sarkozy can expect from a French jail on p24. Bernard Cornwell, whose letter from Cape Cod appears on p26, is the author of Sharpe’s Storm, which is released on 21 October. David Horspool, who writes about the football World Cup on p37, is the author of More Than a Game: A History of How Sport Made Britain. Anna Aslanyan is a writer and translator and the author of Dancing on Ropes: Translators and the Balance of History. She reviews Ginster on p38.…

The Labour conference in Liverpool was a curiously upbeat affair. Much of the good spirit came from schadenfreude at the misadventures of Andy Burnham. The Mayor of Greater Manchester scuttled out of Liverpool just before Keir Starmer’s speech, having united the party in mutual contempt at his posturing in recent days. ‘A fucking clown’ was the verdict of an ex-cabinet minister. ‘He did an Eric Heffer,’ remarked one Labour official – a reference to the cantankerous Liverpool MP who stormed out of Neil Kinnock’s conference speech 40 years ago. ‘It was the worst coup attempt since South Korea,’ says a former aide. Burnham, however, is merely a symptom, not a cause of Labour’s woes. Serious rivals are unlikely to telegraph their ambitions quite so blatantly. Starmer knows that the question…

He dressed to kill, wore leather, silk and fur,an early blip on primitive radarpursued by WAAFs who plotted where you werebut left you never knowing where you are.All gone with gremlins, bandits, tallyho’s,the glimpsed thumbs up through perspex of each crewshot down or blown to pieces in bad showsand lost to loves he, lucky sod, outgrew. Whichever shattered turret they fell from,however many howling angels high,those perished screams left in the intercomgive old men now no easy alibiand guilt, its tubes and wires, won’t let him goas nurses watch him bleep across the screen,come back again, the jammy so-and-so,from nowhere near as bad as where he’s been.…

Like our former ambassador to the United States, Lord Mandelson, I was once vetted by the security services. My brush with the spooks started, as in a Cold War spy novel, with a meeting on a bench in St James’s Park after a distinguished foreign policy wonk of my acquaintance had suggested lunch. As the weather was fine, we decided to pick up sandwiches from the café and sit admiring the pelicans. The diplomat explained the Foreign Office was scouting for new blood for the Policy Planning Staff. I was at the Financial Times and had never knowingly had a blue-sky thought in my life but this sounded… different. The sun shone. Ducks splashed. Tourists wandered past, photographing squirrels. I took a swig from my Coke as I considered a…

For years, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) has wrapped itself in a guise of medical expertise, advising doctors, schools and corporations in America about how best to treat the hundreds of thousands of people who have mysteriously become confused about which sex they are (personally, I’d recommend a quick dart to the loo to pull down their pants). In truth, WPATH is an advocacy organisation whose storm troopers comprise manic men in dresses who hate women but also think they are women. Get your head round that. Last year, a trove of intra-organisational emails exposed the recklessness of its indiscriminate promotion of ‘gender-affirming care’ (neither affirmative nor care) for ostensibly transgender minors. These susceptible children suffer disproportionately from other mental health problems and do not, as WPATH…

Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of the French Republic, has been convicted and sentenced to five years for a ‘criminal conspiracy tied to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign’. For those of us more familiar with Anglo-Saxon criminal law, there’s much to be confused by. France, like many ‘Napoleonic’ legal systems, draws no distinction between determining guilt and sentencing. Both are, of course, determined by the same magistrates or judges. As a result, French courts often hear defendants’ lawyers insist upon their client’s innocence with one breath, before saying that ‘should the judges find them guilty, their sentence should be light because…’. This is all very bizarre to British ears. In our courts, sentencing is not discussed or considered at all until after a defendant has either pleaded…

Moscow mule Sir: While visiting Russia, James Delingpole learned from the patriarchate’s press officer that under communism the Russian Church wasn’t allowed to exist (‘Letter from Moscow’, 27 September). However, that doesn’t accord with my own experience of being in the USSR during the Brezhnev era. As a student, I visited the 14th-century Zagorsk monastery complex just outside Moscow one Sunday and was spellbound by the heavenly chant of the Orthodox liturgy which lifted my soul. The church was full of babushkas as well as younger believers crossing themselves and kissing the icons. For all his faults and human-rights violations, Brezhnev, unlike Vladimir Putin, had not been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes. Nor had he honoured commanders responsible for war crimes. Ukraine has indicted 13 Russian…

The Penguin Book of Penguins: An Expert’s Guide to the World’s Most Beloved Bird by Peter FretwellViking, £14.99, pp. 240 An Inconvenience of Penguins: Epic Voyages in Pursuit of the World’s Most Beloved Bird by Jamie LaffertyWildfire, £25, pp. 320 My first love was a penguin. Pengwee was an adorable brown and white emperor chick who had my heart and broke it the day he dived into the bath. After a week in the airing cupboard he smelled of fish – surprising in a soft toy. But then penguins are surprising. Towards the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago in Zealandia, a fragment of the Gondwana supercontinent, penguins waddled off along their own evolutionary path. Other birds flew through air; penguins flew through water. Natural selection pi-pi-pimped…

World Cup Fever: A Footballing Journey in Nine Tournaments by Simon Kuper Profile, £20, pp. 338 World Cup fever is a strange affliction. It’s more contagious and unavoidable than Covid, and more widespread too: each new World Cup, as Simon Kuper writes, ‘becomes the biggest media event in history’, which ‘occupies the thoughts of billions of people’. It also produces a cluster of sometimes contradictory symptoms, physical as well as mental. Kuper quotes a study that found an increase of 25 per cent in hospital admissions for heart attacks in England on 30 June 1998, when England played Argentina (David Beckham, Michael Owen and all that). Later, he describes the moment when the American journalist Grant Wahl died of an aortic aneurysm in the media stand during the Netherlands vs…

What’s day to a miner?Shovels and picks.Ten fathoms deepthe mind plays tricks. Like: I’m lying in bedwith the sun flooding in.I’m marriedto a bright young thing in a yellow dress.She sings to me.I pull her close.My hands are clean. My hands aren’t clean.We dream the daythen rise at duskto claim our pay with coated hands.Example two:above the cart,a chink of blue wavinglike a tiny flamethat somehow knows me,calls my name and guides usto a richer seam.Shovel, pick,shovel, pick, the sun’s a ghost,the light’s a trick –yet who’s to saythe light’s not true? The mind doeswhat it has to doto save itselffrom total dark. And thought’s a spark.…

Cinderella Coliseum, until 14 October The Hallé/Kahchun Wong Bridgewater Hall, Manchester ‘Goodness Triumphant’ is the alternative title of Rossini’s La Cenerentola, and you’d better believe he meant it. Possibly my reaction was coloured by last week’s experience with the weapons-grade cynicism of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, but honestly – it’s just so sweet. A gentle, put-upon girl gets her fairy-tale ending in the face of stepsisters and a stepfather who are basically buffoons rather than outright villains. We’re in the realm of panto, or children’s TV: nothing really dark can happen here and the only sorcery is worked by Rossini, whose fountain of laughing, crystal-bright invention is as life-affirming as Haydn, if he’d been born 50 years later and in Italy. Pure feelgood, then, for kids of all ages. You can…

Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue; How Are You? I’m Alan (Partridge) BBC1 By now, viewers of TV thrillers are no strangers to a baffling prologue – but this week brought a particularly extreme example. Nine Bodies in a Mexican Morgue opened with shots of a desert, a cactus, an animal skull nailed to a cross and a moustachioed man driving a battered pick-up truck with a Virgin Mary on the dashboard. So we were definitely in Mexico. For a while, however, that was about all that was clear, as the words ‘Day Nine’ flashed up and the truck’s unidentified female passenger spied on a dilapidated military base through binoculars. Nor did anything fall into place when the base’s soldiers talked about a mysterious plane manifest and nine corpses found…

Nigel Farage and Donald Trump are popular because they are resolutely unfashionable: the Mrs Brown’s Boys of politics. — Rory Sutherland, p61 Time to think about my diet. A test kit arrives from the NHS screening team who want to inspect a stool sample to see if a hostile cluster of cells is growing in my guts. What I eat horrifies everyone – except me. I live on Bran Flakes and Frosties straight from the box, and I enjoy chocolate bars or digestive biscuits coated with redcurrant jam (Lidl, 51p). Each year I spend about £600 on food – mostly processed pap full of fructose and additives. ‘Chemical rubbish,’ my mother called it. I avoid restaurants because I can do better at home. I like boiled rice or noodles smothered…

Recently, at the end of a gruelling bridge tournament, I must have been deliriously tired, because as I was thinking about how hard it is to focus on every aspect of the game, a nursery song popped into my head: ‘Heads, shoulders, knees and toes, Heads, shoulders, knees and toes…’ Actually, I don’t think it was as mad as all that. I’d been momentarily transported back to childhood because my struggle to focus simultaneously on each bid, lead and card, had reminded me of being a toddler trying to coordinate different parts of my body all at once. Back in June, I was watching the Polish Premier League online – always a very tough event – when I saw this contract declared by Michal Kwiecien. It’s a perfect example of…

The boy they call the ‘Messi of Chess’ achieved a milestone result at the ‘Legends and Prodigies’ tournament, held in Madrid last month. Eleven-year-old Faustino Oro, from Argentina, won the tournament with 7.5/9, thereby achieving his first grandmaster-level performance. The requirement is for three such results before the title is awarded. But in Madrid he cleared the bar with room to spare, and becomes the youngest player ever to achieve an international rating above the symbolic 2500 level, approximately grandmaster standard. Since 2021, the youngest player to qualify was Abhimanyu Mishra, at 12 years and four months. Energetic middlegame play against a young Spanish master set the scene for an elegant finish. Faustino Oro–Diego Macias Pino Legends & Prodigies, September 2025 White to play, position after 33…Kg8 1 e4 c5…

I was in Australia last week, having been invited to give the annual oration by the Robert Menzies Institute, and stopped off in Singapore on the way home. I’ve always been curious about this Southeast Asian city state, having read so much about Lee Kuan Yew, its Cambridgeeducated founding father, who holds the record of being the world’s longest-serving prime minister. When he assumed office in 1959, Singapore was a fading outpost of the British Empire, seemingly destined to be swallowed up by one of its larger neighbours. The population was impoverished, illiterate and riven with racial conflict. It had no natural resources and most of its 224 square miles was swampland. Yet by the time Lee stepped down 31 years later, it had been transformed into an Asian tiger…

The path to electoral success at the next election is straightforward. Just follow what I call the Channel 5 strategy. Channel 5 is a rare success story in the world of free-to-air broadcasting, a feat attained by following a simple playbook: making programmes the public likes to watch, but which people working in television are mostly too precious to make. Channel 4 got there first. By broadcasting American football, it found a sport which was far more popular with the public than most ‘people in television’ realised. Every NFL game played in London since 2007 saw sold-out crowds at Twickenham or Wembley; when the Pittsburgh Steelers made an appearance in Regent Street, more than 250,000 people turned up. I suspect any political party which promised the UK its own NFL…

Q. My printer is broken, so I asked my neighbour to print off a letter for me. It was from my doctor. I wanted to show it to my husband, who hates reading things on a computer. I hadn’t realised it had two attachments on the bottom with information of a very personal matter. Our neighbour kindly came round with the print-offs, including the attachments. We used to walk our dogs together but now I am so embarrassed I can’t look him in the face. What can I do? – Name and address withheld A. Contact the neighbour to arrange a dog walk as per normal. When you meet up, burst into gales of laughter and claim that you cannot believe that he fell for your practical joke: ‘We went…

As readers will be aware, and without sounding too immodest, this column is absolutely committed to diversity. In an earlier era, that might have seemed unnecessary. A British oenophile did not need to search out bottles from great distances. He could merely take his pleasure from the first growths of Bordeaux and the grands crus of Burgundy, with perhaps a little dalliance on the Rhine or the Rhône. Nor was this only a British modus operandi. I covered the French election of 1981 from Burgundy (there were good political reasons for doing so, as well as other ones). The Burgundians knew that wine was made on the banks of the Gironde, but when I assured them the best of it was excellent, there was polite scepticism. As a result, bargains…

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or so the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that he called on them to ‘reduce and defuse tensions’. What you do with a bomb in a Hollywood movie is to defuse it. Its fuse might be ticking away and you remove it. Tensions can be reduced by figuratively defusing them. But very often tensions and situations are said in newspapers to be diffused, as though they were a nasty gas in a room and you’d opened…

It amuses me that the two main parties most averse to the idea of honours, monarchy, chivalry etc are led by knights – Labour by Sir Keir Starmer and the Liberal Democrats by Sir Ed Davey. This is entirely fitting, since they accurately reflect the dominant Blob establishment world-view and so were rewarded by being made Sir rather than staying plain Mr Blobby. But I wonder if the title has electoral disadvantages. Some voters must be subliminally more annoyed by Sir Somebody telling them to be radical, make sacrifices, save the planet and not to be racist than they would be by an untitled politician. On the other hand, it looks as though Sir Tony Blair, a Knight of the Garter, may soon be ruling in Gaza, at the orders…

Park life Locals were angered by the closing off of 1,500 acres of Windsor Great Park to create a secure area around Forest Lodge, the new home of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Medieval residents of Berkshire would have been in sympathy, as William I had the entire park closed off to the public under his Forest Laws. Large parts of the park were eventually opened to the public by William IV in the 1830s, though it wasn’t good enough for some. In 1972 anti-monarchists set up what they called the People’s Free Festival trying to reclaim the park for the public, claiming it had been illegally enclosed by George III. The festival was repeated for the following two years before being broken up by the police. The following…

University term has started, and even more students are being taught in even larger classes. But to what end? Education was a subject that thinkers like Aristotle who argued that the aim of a state was ‘the sharing by households and families in the good life, i.e. a complete and self-sufficient life’. This being of supreme importance: ‘It is evident that there must be one and the same education for everyone, and the superintendence of this should be public and not private… Public matters should be publicly managed.’ But what was meant by ‘the good life’? Here Aristotle wavered: ‘There are no generally accepted assumptions about what the young should learn, either for virtue or the best life, nor is it clear whether education ought to be conducted with more…

Summer is icumen to its end, but my peach tree yielded a fine crop this year, though most of it was stolen. My mistake was planting the tree close to the road in my front garden, which made it easy for the thief to see and approach. I doubt that the thief reads The Spectator, so it’s safe to reveal my wife’s plan to inject next year’s crop with a powerful laxative. But the few peaches we managed to pick ourselves proved delicious. I was surprised that a peach tree would survive in Cape Cod, let alone thrive, but I constantly forget that we are on the same latitude as Lisbon and our summers are predictably warm. Maybe too warm, because the lobsters are vanishing from Nantucket Sound and migrating…

A friend runs a small factory employing 60 skilled workers. He exports industrial components worldwide, competing with Europe for quality and China for price: a model enterprise for the productive economy we wish we had more of. Earlier this year, his top concerns were the hike in employers’ national insurance (costing the equivalent of several new apprentices) and the advent of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Since then, he’s been hit by a cyber-attack – and his story, a miniature of Jaguar Land Rover’s, is a parable for business everywhere. Like most companies today, this one is paperless: IT-dependent in everything from product design to accounting and HR. It also happens to hold ample cash, which hackers could have spotted from Companies House filings. One morning, the team arrived to find themselves…

On Anti-Semitism: A World in History by Mark Mazower Allen Lane, £20, pp. 333 Shameless: Exploiting the Holocaust by Tanya Gold The Jewish Quarterly, £14.99, pp. 91 Israel would not have been born when it was – 1948 – without Hitler’s genocidal war on European Jewry. Dispossessed Jews had to be provided with a home. In the rush to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, safeguarding Arab nationalism was not the most pressing concern. Israel’s foundation thus marked a turning point in the fortunes of the world more grievous than anyone could have anticipated. The grotesque bestseller The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas spawned a host of pietistic death-camp romances Most European nations supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when President Nasser of Egypt moved his troops into…

Ginster: Written by Himself by Siegfried Kracauer, translated by Carl Skoggard NYRB Classics, £16.99, pp. 336 Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) made his name as a film theorist. His critical writings have long been available in English, and now his fiction is finally getting its due. The first of his two novels – published in Germany in 1928, five years before Kracauer fled the rise of Nazism – uses as its title his journalistic pseudonym. The protagonist inherits other autobiographical details, too, starting from the opening sentence: ‘When the war broke out, Ginster, a young man of 25, found himself in the provincial capital of M.’ Germany’s descent into the Great War is sketched in vividly cubist images. One character ‘consisted of three spheres stacked on top of one another to form…

The solar panel fitter was eating his fried breakfast when the talkative vegans came into the kitchen. They surveyed his plate of bacon, eggs, sausage and black pudding with a look of disgust before helping themselves to cereal, which they doused in the soya milk they had gone to the supermarket to buy, because I refuse to stock milk alternatives. What people eat is now a political issue hotter than the Middle East. It would be easier and safer for me to ask a B&B guest’s views on a two-state solution than say: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ When I ask a guest what they want for breakfast, the vast majority tense up, flush red and begin listing what they will and will not eat, with their myriad complicated…

There are a handful of elements that make me nervous about tackling particular classic recipes. First, if it’s a dish that I didn’t grow up with and can’t speak to personally; secondly, if it’s a dish that a lot of other people did grow up with, and feel very strongly about. Thirdly, if it requires an ingredient that we don’t have in Britain, which I then have to imitate, or simply ignore. That can be pretty restrictive. I didn’t encounter a Staffordshire oatcake until I was 28, so they’d be out. Risotto, which I’m fairly sure doesn’t hail from the north-east coast of England, would be untouchable. Gorgeous vintage puddings like bananas Foster or pecan pie would be out of the question, too. And, yes, the impossibility of accurately replicating…

For Comp 3419 you were invited to write a poem to mark National Vodka Day (4 October) or another spurious designated day, actual or invented. There were several good vodka poems, by Adrian Pascu-Tulbure, D.A. Prince, Tanya Dixon-Clegg, and Helen Baty – I was sorry not to be able to fit them in. Ditto David Silverman’s celebration of National Crisp Day (the ‘Feast of Crispian’), John O’Byrne’s Baked Beans Day, Alan Millard’s Gobbledegook Day, Bill Greenwell’s National Plagiarism Day, Andy Myers’s Breakfast Wine Day, Jayne Osborn’s No Talking About Your Ailments Day, Frank Roots’s Self-ID Day, George Simmers’s Lemon Meringue Pie Day (15 August), and others besides. The £25 vouchers go to the following. Raise spicy Bloody Marys highto National Vodka Day,Serve shaken, stirred martinis, chilled,It’s spud juice all the…