Table of contents for 25 October 2025 in The Spectator

In Silicon Valley there is a simple mantra that drives innovation: You Can Just Do Things. Wait for permission from the system, the bureaucrats or, worst of all, your lawyers, and nothing ever happens. Incumbents want inertia not challenge. Progress depends on movement. It is a lesson that seems lost on this government and this Prime Minister. They are a model of inactivity, none of it masterly. They proclaimed they would be a ‘mission-led’ government. In December last year, Keir Starmer promised that these missions ‘must be felt tangibly in the health, wealth and security of working people and our country’. His ‘missions’ have been all but abandoned. The Education Secretary has halted the creation of new free schools to raise performance, stymied Ofsted’s efforts to challenge educational failure and…

In July, astronomers at the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System discovered an interstellar object racing through the solar system at a velocity never before seen in a purported comet. Only the third interstellar object ever observed, and now named 3I/ATLAS, it has become the subject of inevitably extravagant internet theories. This possibly ten-billion-year-old visitor has now ‘disappeared’ behind the sun, though not before the European Space Agency photographed it from Mars as it passed by. It looks like a luminous cylinder. Optical illusion, says Nasa. Interstellar objects enter our unconscious just as phases of the moon do. Who knows if they also, like the moon, exert mysterious influences on terrestrial minds? Last week I was in London for the gala opening of a film at the Royal Festival Hall based…

After two years of war, and despite Israel’s many successes on the battlefield, Hamas can also claim a kind of victory – at least for now. The terror group has survived and is once again exerting control in the areas of Gaza under its authority. Public executions, whippings, stonings and kneecappings have returned. In the first five days of the ceasefire, Hamas executed at least 100 Gazans. Hamas’s survival was achieved not only through its remaining fighters and its holding of hostages, but also thanks to a chorus of western apologists. A coalition of so-called progressives and professional activists has excused, rationalised and defended the group’s actions across universities and in newspaper editorials. The BBC, Sky, the Guardian, the FT and the New York Times have all parroted Hamas talking…

Louvre incursion Jewellery once belonging to Napoleon’s family was sprung from the Louvre. In 1911 the ‘Mona Lisa’ was stolen by an Italian glazier, Vincenzo Peruggia, who worked there and who managed to slip the painting under his smock. Two years later he was caught when trying to sell it to an antiques dealer in Florence for half a million lire (€2.4 million in today’s money). He spent seven months in jail. Rough sleepers Which council areas had the largest number of rough sleepers in 2024? Westminster 388 Camden 132 City of London 86 Somerset 80 Bristol 77 Brighton and Hove 76 Eight council areas had no rough sleepers: East Hampshire, Isles of Scilly, Mid Suffolk, Oadby and Wigston, Rochford, Rossendale, Staffordshire Moorlands and Uttlesford. Kent and won’t The Reform UK leader of Kent County…

One of the many problems with the internet is that it’s increasingly difficult to know if something has become ubiquitous overnight, or if your algorithm is just serving you the sort of slop it thinks you’re stupid enough to buy. Case in point: nightdresses. Previously the preserve of pioneer women, convalescents and Victorian ghost children, nightdresses suddenly seem to be everywhere. I can’t open my phone without seeing a glamorous woman going about her morning wearing a beautiful and expensive nightgown. ‘Retailers have informed me that sales of nightdresses are higher than ever at present,’ Hannah Banks-Walker, a commissioning editor at Harper’s Bazaar, tells me. Delicious news. I am not alone. I must admit I had until recently regarded nightgowns as something of a secret shame. Wearing one, I felt…

Oh God, not that. That’s all we need, I thought, reading in a long account of Prince Andrew’s current travails that ‘according to visitors to Royal Lodge’, he now ‘spends much of his time playing video games’. Even before all the unpleasantness with Jeffrey Epstein’s child-rape allegations, one of the Prince’s more embarrassing qualities was his appearing as an ‘ambassador’ for this or that – usually accompanied by a helicopter trip to a golf course. Now he’s reduced – no chopper, no putting green; woe is him – to being an ambassador for adults who play video games. As an adult who plays video games, and even writes about them from time to time, I generally welcome news of figures in public life who do the same. Not on this…

During Jane Austen’s time, their roles would be reversed. Lady Annabel Goldsmith, who left us last week at 91, would be Darcy, with Mark Birley and Sir James Goldsmith as Elizabeth Bennet. Both her husbands were womanisers, well-born, but of inferior birth to her. I met her around 60 years ago, and she was as aristocratic as they come, and as down to earth as her puckish irreverence would take her. A quick smirk, a raised eyebrow would turn into something prurient and funny. Wonderfully mischievous, she enjoyed revving it up when the Austro-Australian Princess Michael would complain about me at Annabel’s annual summer party. Annabel would listen to the Austrian, then seek me out, come very close and whisper: ‘The Kents simply adore you.’ Her summer party, by the…

Pornocracy by Jo Bartosch and Robert Jessel Polity, £20, pp. 200 Sex Robots: The End of Love by Kathleen Richardson Polity, £15.99, pp. 241 By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn. The inspiration for this was Linda…

The Rose Field: The Book of Dust, Volume III by Philip Pullman Penguin/David Fickling, £25, pp. 620 In the middle of The Rose Field, the third volume of Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust trilogy, Lyra has a conversation with an angel about storytelling. What matters most in a dream, says Lyra, is not information but emotion. It reads like Pullman’s own manifesto: the power of the His Dark Materials and Book of Dust novels is how much they make us feel – about the tie between characters and their daemons, the fear of Lyra’s sinister mother Mrs Coulter, the love between Will and Lyra, the protectiveness of the courageous pot boy Malcolm Polstead... The driving emotional force that carries us through The Rose Field is our desire to see…

Fionn Regan Pleasance Theatre, Edinburgh, and touring until 28 October Deacon Blue Hydro, Glasgow Watching the Mercury Music Prize on television last week, I remembered that Fionn Regan’s debut album, The End Of History, was nominated for the award back in 2007. Proof were it needed that the prize is rarely a shortcut to superstardom for most of those it spotlights. The Irish singer-songwriter has never quite replicated the mainstream acclaim he gained for his debut – when, for a solid five minutes, he was the latest in a long line of ‘new Bob Dylans’. He has, however, carved out an interesting and worthwhile career across five further albums, expanding his core skill set of folk guitar and knottily poetic wordplay with experimental touches of electronica and orchestration. There was…

Ready meals: the after-work time-saver, the dinner-party cheat – or a poor imitation of proper, cooked food? The proto-ready meal – an entire meal that can be cooked in its packaging, with little or no preparation – was invented in 1945 and called the Strato-Plate, but used only in aviation and military settings. The first mainstream ready meal was the TV dinner. The story goes that in 1953, an American company, Swanson, who produced frozen, oven-ready poultry and pies, had 260 tons of turkey left over after lacklustre Thanksgiving sales. It was being held in railway cars, but the refrigeration for these only worked when the train moved, so Swanson ordered the train to run back and forth between the company’s Nebraska headquarters and the East Coast until a solution…

The Champions Day finale at Ascot gave us, as it should, the best race of the season. Thanks to weather patterns that for once provided not soggily risky October ground but perfect ‘good’ going, few quality horses ducked the meeting. In the Champion Stakes, arguably the three best ten-furlong horses in Europe – Delacroix from Ireland, Ombudsman from England and Calandagan from France – took each other on. In the Eclipse, Aidan O’Brien’s Delacroix had chinned Ombudsman in the dying strides. Delacroix then collected the Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown, with Ombudsman absent because his trainer John Gosden didn’t fancy ‘running against multiple entries from one stable on a track with a short straight’ (whose stable could he have had in mind?). At York, though, Ombudsman beat him soundly. The…

I felt a flush of optimism as England began our final game at the European Team Championships, held in Batumi earlier in October. The previous evening, my teammate Gawain Maroroa Jones had escaped with a draw in a marathon six-hour game, tying the match against a strong Dutch team. That left us paired against the leading team, Ukraine, in the final round. On paper it was an even match, but Ukraine had suffered a setback against Azerbaijan in the previous round, so we had realistic hopes of a podium finish – and even a theoretical chance of gold if the stars aligned. I knew not to underestimate my 16-year-old opponent, Ihor Samunenkov, who was unbeaten in the tournament so far. The attractive finish to his first round game appears below.…

The congratulatory messages started pouring in shortly after 5.30 p.m. on Monday. The Metropolitan Police had just issued a press release saying that the force would no longer investigate ‘non-crime hate incidents’ (NCHIs) and people were chalking this up as a victory for the Free Speech Union, the organisation I run. That may seem a bit of a stretch, but the Met linked the decision to its failed pursuit of Graham Linehan, the comedy writer it arrested at Heathrow airport in September over three tweets taking the piss out of trans-rights activists. It was thanks in part to the FSU, which pulled together Graham’s legal team, that the Met decided to abandon the case. In fact though, the person who deserves most of the credit is Sir Mark Rowley, the…

Q. I was recently lent six books by a friend I see regularly for yoga. I was bemoaning the fact I didn’t have a novel on the go and she said she would bring one or two she has really enjoyed for me to borrow. I have read one and started another but I can tell they are not really for me. How do I get around this conundrum without insulting her taste in literature? – H.E., Tavistock, Devon A. Can you return them saying you ended up only reading one because you’ve rediscovered your passion for something like knitting? Also do say what you thought of the one you did read. As for insulting the taste of your friend, you are presuming too much to think that she will…

Lawrence Osborne, who writes this week’s Diary on p7, is a novelist and the author of The Ballad of a Small Player, the film version of which is in cinemas. Tom Gross, who discusses Hamas’s useful idiots on p12, is a former foreign correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph. Rebecca Reid revels in the joy of nightdresses on p20. Her debut novel, Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage, is out now. Christopher Akers, who reviews a new history of the 1929 crash on p32, looks after Investors’ Chronicle at the Financial Times. Tim Abrahams writes this week’s arts lead on p38 about Oxford architecture’s classical revival. He hosts the Superurbanism podcast.…

In a week where political attention was on espionage and anti-Semitism, the cri de coeur from one Treasury official was notable. Recalling how Budgets were made during the years of Gordon Brown, before the 2010 coalition created the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), the number-cruncher complained: ‘All they had to do was fiddle their own figures. That was a dream compared with this.’ Earlier this month, Rachel Reeves received the OBR’s first estimate of the state of the public finances, showing the depth of the ‘black hole’. She will shortly get another OBR report on how falling productivity is damaging growth. For every 0.1 per cent productivity growth is downgraded, the Chancellor will lose £9 billion by 2029-30 – the crucial year which determines if Reeves sticks to her fiscal…

Contrary to what I had expected, the Oxford Union president-elect, George Abaraonye, lost his vote of no confidence by a whopping margin and will now have to resign. More than 70 per cent of Union members voted for the semi-literate, dreadlocked leftie to lose his job following his apparent delight at the murder of Charlie Kirk. Intimidation and hostility was reported as his supporters sought to disrupt proceedings by hampering the work of the returning officer and Abaraonye, in the manner of a presidential candidate who has been defeated in a general election in a country composed largely of what we are now enjoined to call the global majority, refused to accept the verdict. The ballot was, however, marvellously conclusive – 1,228 out of the 1,746 who voted said he…

The great John O’Sullivan has a story about Enoch Powell which he keeps promising to put into print. Since he still hasn’t done so, I will risk repeating it here. It occurred during a conversation some years after the Rivers of Blood speech. A group of conservatives were talking, and Powell was among them. At some point one of those present referred to the 1968 speech and asked Powell: ‘Why did you do it?’ Powell’s reply started something like this: ‘When the lark sings in the morning they do not say – “Oh lark why dost thou sing?” When the nightingale gives forth her song…’ and so on. After Powell had gone through an array of the bird kingdom metaphors, he came to his clincher: ‘And so it was with…

Whatever Prince Andrew has done, the succession to our throne is secure. How envious the Roman emperor Augustus would have been! In vain did he offer rewards for faithful marriage and punishments for adultery and such like. The mildest punishment was temporary expulsion from Roman territory; the harshest, banishment in perpetuity to an ‘island or oasis’, with loss of property and citizenship, and death for returning. But Augustus’s only child, Julia, who had five children, took advantage of her husband’s lengthy spells abroad and had (it appears) many lovers, and even assignations in the middle of the forum. She explained the improbable fact that all her children were the very image of their father by pointing at her belly and saying: ‘I take on passengers only when the boat is…

SEN and sensibility Sir: As a former teacher and long-standing chair of governors in a local school, I share Rosie Lewis’s frustration at the parlous situation regarding special educational needs (‘Fare play’, 18 October). I also sit on a weekly area admissions committee and many schools in our area are full, often with long waiting lists. The main reason given why children are denied a place is the number of SEN pupils already in a year group, normally, incredibly, in excess of 30 per cent – sometimes 50 per cent. To admit another pupil with special needs or behavioural issues would be detrimental to the education of children already there. This causes appeals, further discussions and headaches for parents, heads and local education authorities. Most importantly, of course, it means…

The Lack of Light by Nino Haratischwili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin HarperVia, £20, pp. 717 For a newly independent Georgia, the 1990s were a dark time literally and figuratively, as civil war raged, criminality flourished and the power stayed off. The Lack of Light, Nino Haratischwili’s fourth novel to be translated into English, turns that darkness into a gripping story about the power and pitfalls of female friendship that seeks to unpick the horrors of that decade. The narrative opens, briefly, in Tbilisi in 1987. The four protagonists – Keto, Dina, Nene and Ira – are on a schoolgirl mission to hang out in the Botanical Garden after hours. The escapade introduces the girls, who are all neatly – too neatly – ascribed various characteristics. Dina is…

Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle to think of a worse context in which to look at art of any stripe. Still, it always used to be an occasion to take the pulse of the contemporary art world, to pick out the visual signatures of the reigning avant-garde tendency and clock what Jeremy Deller was doing with his facial hair at any given moment. This year’s iteration proposed no such insights. Instead, it offered acres of samey, vaguely woo-woo figurative painting;…

The Rape of Lucretia Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, and touring until 21 November The Magic Flute Royal Opera House, until 3 November English Touring Opera has begun its autumn season and the miracle isn’t so much that they’re touring at all these days, but that they do it so well. Two generations back, this was the natural condition of opera in the UK: not Netrebko at Covent Garden, but agile, medium-scale companies playing at the Wolverhampton Grand or the Sheffield Lyceum alongside the panto and the 1950s equivalent of Friends: The Musical and An Evening with Sandi Toksvig. Don’t believe it? It’s all in Alexandra Wilson’s new book Someone Else’s Music, which is out now, and which all British opera buffs should read because it’ll make their jaws drop. Case in…

Chad Powers Disney+ I’m trying to think of things I’m less interested in than American football. The plant-based food section? Taking up my GP’s offer of a free Covid booster? Ed Miliband’s nostril depilation regime? No, apart from maybe baseball, I can’t think of anything so soul-crushingly tedious as a rigged game where men in shoulder pads and portcullised helmets shout numbers, bash into one another, then wait half an hour while the referee decides whether or not they’re allowed to throw a spinny ball and maybe one day end up being Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend. So you’ll never guess what the subject is of my favourite new American comedy series, Chad Powers… When I say ‘favourite’ I ought perhaps to mention that a) I don’t generally watch American comedy…

A man called Gianluca and I mounted the steps to the Friedrichsbad in pensive silence. We hadn’t made eye contact since we’d met in reception at our hotel, the divine Brenners, for this rendezvous with destiny. At the front desk, we were sternly reminded again of the dress code. We nodded. For the next three hours we were going to be stark naked in a 19th-century, Renaissance-themed, domed and frescoed temple to the God of Thermal Springs, adorned with hand-painted majolica tiles, statuary and a sequence of pools and chambers. ‘Kein Textil,’ the woman repeated. After removing every stitch, we processed to the shower room – me checking that the area, which was equipped with vast ceiling-mounted bronze fittings, had several exits. I was wearing only blue plastic slippers. We…

‘Greed is good,’ announced Gordon Gekko, in what became a definitive clarion call for the 1980s. But as we all regretfully know, greed often ends in disaster. Have you ever sat over a pint after the game with the hand records in front of you and said: ‘Jolly lucky I didn’t double that four spades. They could run to four no-trumps and make it!’ It’s true, they could, but in general they won’t. Successful run-outs occur rather seldom, but when they do they’re almost always spectacular. This hand from the World Bridge Tour in Copenhagen last month impressed. West could have collected 100 in 5♥ undoubled, but he understandably thought it could well be more and attached a double. Most players would shrug and pass this out, thinking they had…

For Competition 3422 you were invited to submit a poem or passage on the theme of ‘daylight saving’. In a very good batch, once again the poetry bubbled to the top. There are too many close runners-up to name names, and it seems best to maximise space for winners. The £25 vouchers go to the following. In honour of Surrey housebuilder William Willett,who first suggested it for the UK in a 1907 pamphletIf you can lower fuel bills for the lowlyAnd make them use the sun for heat instead;If you can make the cows chew cud more slowlySo milkmaids have an extra hour in bed;If you can fool the public into thinkingThey have more time to work and rest and play;If inn-keepers can maximise our drinkingTo keep the coopers loading…

Moments when a 24-carat superstar bursts on the scene are few and far between, but always something to cherish. And we rugby fans have had two in the past few weeks. First came the dazzling performance by Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, the Springbok No 10 who tore apart a powerful Argentina side in Durban in September, scoring a record 37 points with three tries, eight conversions and two penalties. With his effortless running and velvet touches all over the field, he suddenly gives the traditional raw power of the Boks an explosive new dimension. He is compellingly watchable, only 23, and will soon be as much of a benchmark of rugby excellence as the French scrum-half Antoine Dupont. Closer to home was an extraordinary display by a north London teenager on his…

When you are old enough, you can measure your life in restaurants. I remember, for instance, when the Electric Diner on Portobello Road (named for a long ago and far away war) was a place to eat brunch, a meal that shouldn’t exist and doesn’t really, though if it belongs anywhere it belongs here. It was fine but glib – Notting Hill is either a place with no imagination or too much of it, I’m still not sure. How it can tolerate the truth of Grenfell Tower across the way I don’t know either, but I don’t live here. The diner is gone, replaced by a Thai restaurant – the Speedboat Bar, twin to a branch in Soho – that is almost too interesting for Notting Hill. Understand that Portobello…

When I meet Piers Morgan, he warns me he’s glued to the ‘moment in history’ happening on his TV screens that morning. He is watching Hamas release the remaining Israeli hostages as part of the peace deal negotiated by his old friend Donald Trump. The two have known each other for 17 years, first meeting when Morgan appeared in – and won – Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice in 2008. He tells me that Trump’s final words to him on the show were: ‘Piers, you’re a vicious guy. I’ve seen it. You’re tough. You’re smart. You’re probably brilliant. I’m not sure. You’re almost certainly not diplomatic. But you did an amazing job. And you beat the hell out of everybody… You’re the Celebrity Apprentice.’ Eight years later, when Trump won the 2016…

Imagine I were to begin this column by remarking that a woman preaching is like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not done well, but you’re surprised to find it done at all. Dear me, that would never do, even in as cheeky a magazine as The Spectator. Then try instead: ‘Dr Johnson was no admirer of the female sex. “A woman’s preaching,” he said, “is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”’ I could get away with that. An antiquated opinion, safely attributed to an 18th-century writer, enclosed behind quotation marks and decorated with a few cobwebs, can still be sneaked past our 21st-century censors. But how about a more…

They moved, with a sort of nonchalant intent, up the aisle to make communion with their God; the men in bow ties and immaculate blazers, the women in pearls. They spent the service making small bows, singing (but not too loudly) and wearing looks of pacific – or rather, north Atlantic – calm. These were the Wasps and this was St Thomas Fifth Avenue, one of their high temples in New York, where they come for their moments of triumph and where the world often bids them adieu. It was hard to tell from those gathered on a recent Sunday morning if the stiffness of their physical motions was the result of societal convention or merely age. For as the age of those at St Thomas’s indicated, the Wasp is…

The Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office, handsomely housed in London’s Bedford Square, is responsible for trade relations between the formerly British ‘special administrative region of the People’s Republic’ and the UK, Scandinavian and Baltic states, and Russia. Its organigram boasts a ‘dedicated team for attracting businesses and talents’, including specialists in ‘investment promotion (fintech)’. So far so good: those who detest China’s suppression of Hong Kong also tend to believe its best hope for a return to relative freedom lies in attracting global attention as a hub of trade and finance. But also on the HKETO chart is ‘Office Manager Bill C.B. Yuen’, who will shortly be attracting headlines of a different kind. While the scandal of Downing Street’s role in the ‘collapsed China spy case’ rumbles on, there’s…

Running Amok: Inside the Mind of the Lone Mass Killer by Paul E. Mullen Extraordinary Books, £20, pp. 240 ‘I have had more direct clinical experience than almost any other forensic psychiatrist of assessing and managing lone-actor perpetrators of massacres,’ writes Paul Mullen, professor emeritus at Monash University in Australia, in his introduction to Running Amok. He’s got non-clinical experience, too. In 1990, when he lived near Aramoana in New Zealand, he was disturbed by gunfire one night. It turned out that the neighbour of one of his patients was busy killing 13 people. Afterwards, Mullen supported the survivors and his patient, who felt ‘anguish’ at not spotting the red flags to prevent the massacre. Mullen summarises what she told him about the killer: His mood was marked by elements…

True Nature: The Lives of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson Chatto & Windus, £30, pp. 736 In 1951, the American author Peter Matthiessen moved to Paris. The scion of a wealthy Wasp family, he had studied at Yale and served in the navy, narrowly missing the second world war. He was then recruited to the CIA by James Jesus Angleton and sent to Paris, where he kept tabs on left-wing French intellectuals and expat Americans. As he later explained in a letter to a friend: When you’re 23, it seems pretty romantic to go to Paris with your beautiful young wife to serve as an intelligence agent and write the Great American Novel into the bargain. Weren’t you ever as young and dumb as that? While in Paris, Matthiessen helped…

On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan Faber, £12.99, pp. 160 When I interviewed Andrew O’Hagan ten years ago about his Booker longlisted novel The Illuminations, the most striking thing that he said was: Friendship is more important than almost anything. I always thought it was a sort of deliverance, having a good friend, that they would bring a generosity and an unprejudiced eye to your ambition, your hopes and your thoughts in a way that family can’t always do. I mean what is family but a lovable collection of prejudices, some in your favour and some not? Although I agreed with him, I was intrigued that someone who was both a parent and a sibling would feel this way. The importance of friendship is clearly an ongoing preoccupation. His 2020 novel…

Da Vinci’s Laundry Riverside Studios, until 25 October Fanny King’s Head Theatre, until 15 November Da Vinci’s Laundry is based on an art world rumour. In 2017, Leonardo’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ sold at Christie’s for $450 million but some experts claimed that the attribution was inaccurate. Could the world’s costliest artwork be a fake? Writer, Keelan Kember, considers the provenance of a fictional Leonardo owned by a thuggish oligarch, Boris, who claims to have bought the masterpiece at a flea market. He invites two posh British experts, Christopher and Milly, to authenticate the painting and when Christopher questions its origins he earns Boris’s instant displeasure. Boris threatens to toss Christopher from the roof of his luxury mansion. Enter a brash American, named Tony, who wants to buy the Leonardo on behalf…

Grade: B+ War, as we all know, is hell. But if it involves small squeaky annelids blowing each-other up with bazookas, it is also hella fun. And so to the newest installment in the long-running turn-based strategy series Worms. Can it be a coincidence that Worms Across Worlds arrives on Apple Arcade just in time for the release of Philip Pullman’s final His Dark Materials book? Yes, it absolutely can. Nevertheless the latest Worms, like Pullman’s work, is set in a multiverse in which intrepid heroes travel through portals between worlds. The world of Worms, like the world of His Dark Materials, mingles science and experimental theology: you can see off rival worms with a nuclear strike or a holy hand grenade. But nowhere in Philip Pullman’s work, I don’t…

The thoroughbred looked cross, with flared nostrils and a pinched expression, so I should have known what was about to happen. It’s always bad news when the mare’s serene beauty drains out of her face and she affects a look like a female daytime television panel member. She turned round and bit me as I led her in from the field, and she only ever does that when she’s trying to tell me something. In the barn, she nibbled a strand of hay from her net, and spat it back out. It’s always bad news when the mare affects to look like a female daytime television panel member Then she turned herself round in circles several times, before buckling her knees and collapsing herself like a folding sun chair. With…

The boardroom clapometer said it all. Hosted by the winemaker Louisa Rose and the sixth-generation family member Lucy Hill-Smith, our Spectator Winemaker Lunch featuring the wines of Yalumba – Australia’s oldest family-owned winery, founded by Samuel Smith in the Barossa Valley 175 years ago – was one of our finest. I’ve never heard such riotous applause, nor seen such broad smiles across our readers’ chops. Mrs Ray, being half-Australian, had threatened to join us but was slow out of the traps and had to make do with the bottles Lucy kindly sent me to try at home. Fret not, she made the most of it. And the wines were so darn good, I’m delighted to offer them here courtesy of our good chums at Honest Grapes. The 2024 Yalumba Samuel’s…

‘ “I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’ By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in a book you might not wish your wife or your servants to read. It is The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905) about boys at Harrow, more particularly the love between them. Surprisingly it caused no outrage at the time. The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F. Marion Crawford, in a scene in Baden-Baden, we are told that an English duke was…