Table of contents for 22 November 2025 in The Spectator

Follow the Science. The Science is settled. Two phrases which invoke the power of open inquiry to close down open inquiry. Science is not a body of unalterable doctrine, a chapter of revealed truths. Science is a method. It is a means of arriving at the best possible explanation of phenomena through thesis, testing, observation and revision. Science depends on a culture of doubt, as one of the greatest scientists of the last century, Richard Feynman, continually argued. Its conclusions, by definition, are provisional models which are subject to future revision as new data and better explanations arrive. The story of science is a chronicle of old models being superseded and new theories seeking to make sense of our world. Throughout its history, science has been misunderstood, sometimes deliberately, often…

Cannabis smoke lingering along the sidewalks of Washington D.C. was the most palpable fruit of liberty since my last visit to the US capital. I’m in town to give a talk at Britain’s dazzling Lutyens Residence about the evergreen ‘special relationship’ ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary next July. Acting ambassador James Roscoe has stepped up with aplomb to fill Peter Mandelson’s big shoes, aided by his renaissance wife, the musician, author and broadcaster Clemency Burton-Hill. America’s anniversary will fall on the watch of its 47th President. The Republic’s first four incumbents, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, inspired by some of the greatest minds of their and any age David Hume, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, made the new country. The anniversary is a vital opportunity…

Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after Jim Callaghan’s government had lost a vote of no confidence, paving the way for Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in No. 10. Healey was reduced to merely introducing the finance bill to maintain normal tax collection functions, and made no other announcements at all. But as chaos surrounds Rachel Reeves’s second Budget next week, one senior figure fondly recalled that simpler time. Healey began his 27-minute ‘non-Budget’ (as Geoffrey Howe called it) speech by confessing: ‘I feel a little bit like a man who turns up to play the leading role in the opera and all they want him to do is to help them hold the scenery together.’ In truth, holding…

Finding someone who ‘likes’ Sir Keir Starmer is a terribly enervating quest, and I have given up on it without success. It is true that I have not contacted Sir Keir’s close family members, or indeed canvassed inside the walls of Broadmoor hospital, so it may be that some tiny reservoirs of affection remain. Less reservoirs than sumps, really. But the generality is that people seem to loathe him – the responses I get when I accost people in the street and say, ‘What do you think of Sir Keir Starmer?’ are largely unprintable, except in London, where for some reason the most common reply is to invoke the name of the author of The Critique of Pure Reason, which is mystifying. Whatever, people detest him. They think he is…

It is always interesting to see who the American left claims are the leaders of the American right. There was a time during President Trump’s first term when Steve Bannon fitted the role – and relished playing it. Back then most days brought another media profile of the dark genius of the MAGA movement. The Guardian, New York Times and others were obsessed. Vanity Fair would send reporters to follow Bannon as he conquered America and, er, Europe. Documentary crews were perennially in tow. Indeed one documentary following Bannon around included a scene in which they followed him to the showing of another documentary about him from a crew who had similarly followed him around. At which point you felt that we might fall into some kind of vortex. The…

Like Adolf Hitler, I have been involved in a Channel 4 documentary about penises. I also share a love for watercolours and a partiality for Wagner but that, I promise, is where the similarities end. But back to penises. The Führer’s genitalia – or lack thereof – is a feature of a new documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. The documentary makers have examined a scrap of the bloodied fabric from the bunker sofa upon which Hitler blew his brains out and the long – but mostly the short – of the findings are that history’s most evil man likely had underdeveloped sexual organs, including a micropenis and an undescended testicle. So now we know that the popular wartime ditty ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, was rather closer…

Doing the rounds on social media is the most disturbing advert I’ve ever seen. And I’m telling you about it because you need to be forewarned, just in case this Christmas a child or a grandchild happens to mention that it might be an idea to record a video for posterity, and opens the 2wai app. 2wai is the company responsible for the ad, and the service it offers is the creation of AI versions of family members so that relatives can talk to them after they’re dead. Catch ’em while they’re still alive, says 2wai; film a three-minute interview and Bob’s your AI uncle. ‘Loved ones we’ve lost can be part of our future.’ That’s its catchphrase. The 2wai advert is about ‘Baby Charlie’, and it goes like this.…

Cross channel Sir: As a supporter of the BBC, it pains me to say that Rod Liddle and Lara Brown both made excellent points in their articles (‘Agony Auntie’ and ‘Pushing it’, 15 November). It strikes me that the BBC could help itself by appointing journalists to the key BBC News roles who are not also seen as being campaigners. Contrast the consummate professionalism of Hugh Pym, the health editor, with the hyperbole of Justin Rowlatt, the climate editor, who gleefully predicts doom every time there’s a storm. It would be interesting to see what would happen if they swapped roles. Mark HisemanMaidstone, Kent Tuned out Sir: Having read Rod Liddle’s article, I can find no solution offered as to how to fix the BBC’s many problems – not least…

Carole King: She Made the Earth Moveby Jane Eisener Yale University Press, £16.99, pp. 242 On 7 December 2015 the Kennedy Centre Honours were awarded to Carole King, George Lucas, Rita Moreno, Seiji Ozawa and Cicely Tyson. King sat by the White House Christmas tree during the afternoon reception wearing her medal and laughing as Barack Obama recited the most familiar of her thousands of song lines: ‘You make me feel like a natural woman.’ Obama grinned: ‘I think I just became the first president ever to say that... It sounded better when Aretha said it.’ That evening the tribute to King as a singer-songwriter included performances from James Taylor and the cast of the Broadway spectacular Beautiful: The Carole King Musical and concluded with an astounding performance by Aretha…

‘When people see the word “chef” on the cover of a cookbook, it can set off alarm bells. It’s intimidating, I get it,’ says Ben Lippett, a former chef. The statement does make one wonder. When does a cook become a chef or a chef become a cook? Recently I sulked, I don’t know why, when a friend introduced me as ‘a chef’. It is an estimable compliment, surely suggesting one is better than a good professional cook. But I have never put in all those hours. With his book How I Cook (Harper Collins, £26), Lippett reminds me of the early Nigel Slater. He is a wonderful mentor to get you started if you seriously want to become a good home cook, but one who will not saddle you…

The history of the male ballet dancer is a chequered one. In the early 19th century, he was the star of the show, albeit more as an acrobat and tumbler than fairy-tale prince. The vogue for sylph-like damsels floating in white tulle put paid to that, reducing him to the auxiliary role of porter and attendant. Then came the comet of Nijinsky, introducing a note of mysterious Slavic androgyny that left the male dancer suspiciously homosexual and prone to the ‘pink tights’ cliché. Nureyev and Baryshnikov cemented the exotic Russian connection, until the late 1990s when the allure of the musical Billy Elliot and Matthew Bourne’s version of Swan Lake opened ballet up to a generation of British boys who would otherwise have preferred kicking a football around. On the…

The Thing With Feathers15, Nationwide The Thing With Feathers is an adaptation of Max Porter’s acclaimed novella about a widower who is left to raise his two sons after his beloved wife’s sudden death and whose grief is embodied in the form of a monstrous, giant black crow. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch, who gives his absolute all, but while the film deploys psychological horror tropes it’s too mired in a pit of despond to be anything other than a misery fest. Also, while the crow works as metaphor in the book (it’s a rather wonderful book, as it happens), on film it’s a disaster. Unless, that is, you too see grief as a big talking bird that is very clearly a fella in a costume. The film opens on the…

When Buckingham Palace announced that its errant prince, Andrew, would be known as boring old Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, some surprise arose at the initial omission of the hyphen from his surname. The hyphen is, unlike King Lear’s whoreson zed, a necessary thing; without it, names float, unmoored, unsure whether they are attached to first name or surname. The hyphen, despite Lord Tennyson’s ‘idiotic’ hatred of them in his younger years, is a bringer of joy. It joins disparate parts, meaning, as it does, ‘under one’, from the Greek ‘huph’ hen’. It is the most comforting of punctuation marks, despite its ephemerality, slipping, fawn-like, in and out of usage. Who now writes mantle-piece or black-berries? This is a great sadness; more so is a general confusion with the en dash or…

For the past 30 years Robin Oakley has taken you through the front door of the horse-racing world and kept you in the best of company. There’s not a chance of me lasting that long, and more often than not when I try to shine a light on the sport’s brilliant mix of heroes, narcissists and geniuses it will be via the back door. Alex Frost falls firmly into the genius category, so I went to see him in London last week – and I arrived bang out of sorts. My Oura Ring informed me that I had 26 low blood oxygen incidents during the night and my sleep apnea mask is making weird noises. And combining microdosing Mounjaro with getting soaked in the wrong gear at the Countryside Day…

The biennial Fide World Cup underway in Goa is a feast for chess fans. Lasting nearly a month, more than 200 participants are whittled down to a single winner through a series of knockout matches, starting with two games of classical chess, followed by rapid and blitz tiebreaks if necessary. Stakes are high, with a $2 million prize fund, and the top three finishers qualifying for the prestigious Candidates tournament (to be held in Cyprus in the spring), whose winner will challenge for the world championship. The game below was an early highlight. The queen sacrifice is not new, and Harikrishna was probably aware that computer evaluations slightly favour the queen, but rightly trusted his own judgment. Faced with the dominant knight on d6, Nesterov struggled to develop his forces.…

In my brief career as a parliamentarian I have developed a rule of thumb when it comes to evaluating legislation: if a bill has been brought forward in response to a national outcry about a terrible tragedy, whether the death of a child or dozens of adults, it will almost always be rotten. In particular, it will go far beyond what is required to prevent similar tragedies in future and create a swath of new laws that the already overburdened police will be expected to enforce. That I’m afraid is the default response of parliament when it’s trying to respond to an eruption of public anger: to stick more criminal offences on the statute books. A case in point is the Public Office (Accountability) Bill, known colloquially as the Hillsborough…

People say that Carbone is Jay Gatsby’s restaurant – Gatsby being the metaphor for moneyed doomed youth – but it is something more awful and, because people are asleep, no London restaurant has been this fashionable since the Chiltern Firehouse a decade ago. It lives in the basement of the former American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which is now the Chancery Rosewood Hotel. I thought this building would smell of fear, of why-can’t-I-have-a-visa-please? The truth is that it does, but that fear is now a commodity: you can be the person saying no-visa-for-you. (‘Uniquely yours,’ says the advertising copy. It means it.) And now, if you are rich enough, you can inhabit the instruments of the American Republic for pleasure, and that is why they kept the immense golden eagle…

Sir Richard Dearlove, who says that China is benefiting from the West’s green policies on p14, is a former head of MI6 (1999-2004). Andreas Roth, who writes about the decline of the German education system on p26, has been a teacher in Germany, Ireland and Serbia across a 40-year career. Anne Margaret Daniel reviews a new biography of Carole King on p36. She teaches literature at the New School University. Muriel Zagha is a writer and broadcaster who co-hosts the Garlic & Pearls podcast. On p48, she travels to where Powell and Pressburger shot one of their finest films. We’re delighted to welcome Charlie Brooks as our new Turf columnist on p54. Charlie is a racehorse trainer and ex amateur jockey who rode in the Grand National.…

Before the last election, Keir Starmer promised that his party’s relationship with the countryside would be ‘based on respect, on genuine partnership’. But, 16 months into his premiership, the government is shedding rural votes after Rachel Reeves’s changes to inheritance tax. Protesters wearing flat caps and riding tractors have become a familiar sight in Westminster, such is the outrage about the effect on family farms. At the most recent protests, Labour MPs in rural seats were reduced to begging the Treasury to pause the changes ahead of the Budget. ‘So many of my farmers are pleading with me,’ admitted Samantha Niblett, MP for South Derbyshire. In the words of Ribble Valley’s Maya Ellis, the tax changes endanger Labour’s ‘once in a generation chance’ to demonstrate fairness for rural Britain. According…

On a winter’s day, we took a trip to Wrabness.I was forcibly struck by Wrabness’s drabness.An empty street, as if everyone was ill.The air was preternaturally still.There was a single closed and shuttered shop.No birds sang. It wasn’t Adlestrop.Down at the estuary, the water was slate-grey,the sand and stones the colour of wet clay.The trees were black and bare, the sky was white.The windless air retained a wintry bite.When we got back to the station, our train had gone.We waited on the platform as an hour dragged on.Wrabness will remain with me, I think:a cold, astringent but refreshing drink.…

Imagine dropping a pea-sized capsule through a spherical chamber and hitting it with a colossal bolt of laser energy as it falls. If the capsule contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two heavy versions (isotopes) of hydrogen, then the atoms may fuse, turning into helium and emitting fast neutrons as they do so. Those neutrons and their accompanying radiation can heat molten salts around the walls of the chamber and that heat can be used to power industrial processes – or to boil water and generate electricity through a steam turbine. That’s the dream of a firm called Xcimer, one of the more ingenious fusion energy startups, based in Colorado. Three years ago, on 5 December 2022, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, this technique was used…

Time was, you didn’t look forward to going to the dentist. Even for routine stuff, your highest aspiration would be to get it over as quickly as possible with as little unpleasantness as possible. Most of the procedures seem pretty mechanical, including having the most sensitive bits of your teeth scraped with a metal thing. That was what I thought before I encountered Anti-Ageing Dentistry at the Nejati clinic in Belgravia, where the founder – it seems wrong to call Brandon Nejati a mere dentist – talks about ‘pampering’. This is where a really expensive luxury spa meets dentistry and it’s the most obvious example of how oral care is changing. Brandon’s wife, Mahsa – they’re from Iran – talks about the Oral Hygiene Treatment Wellbeing Experience as a ‘facial…

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social insurance contributions, and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, the equivalent of a grammar school, I have learned that challenging students is frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted. A mathematics teacher tells me that sixth-form assignments he set 20 years ago would…

How, I wonder, did a shortlist of candidates to succeed Sir Mark Tucker as chairman of HSBC come into the public domain? The three names ‘exclusively’ revealed by Sky News, if they really are the final contenders, ought to be a secret kept between a board committee led by senior independent director Ann Godbehere and the headhunters on the job, named as MWM Consulting. Two of the three – Kevin Sneader from Goldman Sachs and Naguib Kheraj, formerly of Barclays and Standard Chartered – might feature in a round-up of usual suspects. But the third is the former chancellor George Osborne, who has no public-company chairmanship experience and is, to say the least, a Marmite figure. Hence we might suspect a judicious leak – HSBC says it won’t comment on…

On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-Allby Arnoud S.Q. Visser Princeton University Press, £25, pp. 344 No one likes a pedant. But over the past few millennia, people have shunned pedants, bores and know-it-alls for a wide range of different, often conflicting, reasons. They have been accused of obscuring the path to true philosophical knowledge and of putting learning on too high a pedestal; they’ve been regarded as unfit to be democratic leaders; too unskilled in the aristocratic virtues; too keen to rise above their natural class; and as stubborn impediments to a true comprehension of the divine. At times they’ve been deemed too unmanly and too feeble; at others, far too boorish, charmless, unable to think for themselves and probably horrible at parties. Arnoud S.Q. Visser, a professor…

The Hour of the Predator: Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the Worldby Giuliano da Empoli, translated by Sam Taylor Pushkin, £12.99, pp. 160 At the opening of The Hour of the Predator, Giuliano da Empoli describes Spain’s conquest of the Aztec empire, its doomed ruler Moctezuma II’s response (ineffective vacillation, delaying any course of action), its consequences and its relevance to politics today. It is a striking introduction to a brief, bracing and profoundly alarming book. The author argues that an alliance of tech bros and authoritarian rulers – whom he calls modern-day Borgias – are sweeping away the rules-based international order. He sees our elected leaders as comparable to the procrastinating Aztec emperor, appeasing and hesitating as the opportunity for action passes into history. Da…

Loyle CarnerO2 Academy, Glasgow, and touring until 25 November A male British rapper who is unafraid to show tenderness and vulnerability is not a particularly new phenomenon: Dave, Stormzy, Headie One and Kano have all walked this path in recent times. None, however, has made emotional fragility his USP to quite the same extent as Loyle Carner, who writes about his children, his masculine role models, mental health, race and inherited trauma in an unthreatening sing-song style which has made him both a pop star and a bit of a poster boy for Feeling Things. His tour is named after his fourth and most recent album, hopefully!. To his credit, he has put his money where his rhymes are. Carner has preached about knife crime from the stage at Glastonbury.…

The Hunger Games on StageTroubadour Canary Wharf Theatre, until 25 October 2026 The Meat Kings! (Inc.) of Brooklyn HeightsPark 200, until 29 November The Hunger Games is based on a 2008 novel about a despotic regime where brainwashed citizens are entertained with televised duels between teenagers. Not a bad idea. We go behind the scenes and watch Katniss (Mia Carragher) being selected to fight Peeta (Euan Garrett) who secretly adores her. As soon as the plot starts, it seizes up. Instead of a gripping tragedy about two lovers forced to kill each other on TV, we’re given a masterclass in the show’s elaborate format. The duellists take part in interviews, coaching sessions, target practice, public parades and a popularity contest which permits them to attract ‘sponsors’ whose role is opaque.…

Apparently it’s easy to make money on You-Tube by teaching a course in your specialism. Mine is having no friends. And I share my aversion to humanity with a number of very distinguished names. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson and Howard Hughes were all solitary creatures who didn’t allow social frippery to dilute the focus of their ambitions. Psychologists tell me I have ‘autism’, which is promoted so widely in our society that we ought to call it ‘taughtism’. But I take issue with these experts. I don’t believe I have a neurological disorder. And I’m not some crazy hermit who lives in a cave or a ditch. I simply can’t help noticing that most human beings are a waste of space – myself included. I have a handful…

I first met Susanna in 1987 when Ed Victor, the late literary agent, invited both of us for lunch at the recently opened River Café. It was love at first sight as she chatted hilariously about her up-and-coming blind date with a rather well-known politician and people we knew, all of whom had something in common: they played bridge. Ed and his wife Carol had been taking lessons and were properly hooked. It was typical of Susanna’s generosity that she frequently played with them, not minding at all that they were newbies and she was already a very good player. She asked me if I played and I told her I didn’t. ‘Well you must learn,’ she said: ‘the sooner the better.’ It was to be another ten years before…

Victoria Lane Comp. 3426 was inspired by Stephen Vincent Benét’s 1927 poem ‘American Names’ (see Charles Moore’s Notes, 1 November): I have fallen in love with American names,The sharp names that never get fat,The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat. You were invited to submit poems to do with place names. It was hard to whittle down the very good entries (too many runners-up to single any out) though certain places kept cropping up so I tried to avoid too much repetition. The £25 vouchers go to the following. Morning! After downing booze,Have a fryup, come the dawn –Chopwell, chipping. You’ll enthuse:Ham and eigg, or even quorn – Rustle up another bangor,Greet the brand new, sober day-o!A burgar hill, you want a…

And so it begins, as Donald Trump likes to say, though not usually about cricket. He was offering his thoughts on the New York mayoral elections, which is not as much fun as the Ashes. Pleasingly, the goading is reaching volcanic levels as the Perth Test gets ever closer. Who needs Trump? The West Australian is not a paper many readers will be familiar with but its pages have been plastered with pictures of English players making their way through arrivals at Perth airport. A large photograph of Ben Stokes pushing his luggage trolley was headlined ‘BAZ BAWL’, with the subheading ‘England’s Cocky Captain Complainer, still smarting from “crease-gate”, lands in Perth early thinking dopey “Bazball” can take the Ashes’, referring to the controversial stumping of Jonny Bairstow by Australia’s…

I heard on the wireless a reference to the growing number of small political parties getting funds from short money. I’m afraid I let it slide past me as one of the many things about money that I don’t understand. Short is an extremely productive element in English vocabulary. Shorthaul journeys preceded by decades the invention of aeroplanes. The unlikely-sounding shorthorn carrots have been with us since the 1830s. The lightweight Americans favour short hundredweights, which are only 100lb instead of the Imperial and godly 112lb; worse, their standard ton is consequently a short ton of 2,000lb, a long way off the metric tonne, to which British tons approximate. The short-order cook was employed from the latter part of the 19th century to prepare food quickly for customers in a…

About seven years ago, I bought two pairs of pyjamas, one British, the other Chinese. At the time, they seemed of roughly similar quality, the important difference being that the Chinese ones were half the price of the British. Given that they have the same ‘lived experience’, I can make a direct comparison. The British ones, by Peter Christian (‘gentlemen’s outfitters’ accompanied by an image of two hares boxing), show few signs of the passing years. Their reddish colour with green and yellow stripes holds fast. There is very little wear and no tear at all. The Chinese pair (labelled ‘sleepwear’) tells a different story – the drawstring disappeared, the elasticated waist (which the British one wisely eschews) decayed, the blue checks faded, the cotton thinned. Every Chinese button repeats…

On Monday night, former England manager Gareth Southgate joined MPs and philanthropists for an event in Westminster described as ‘the Oscars of the charity world’. Cabinet ministers Lisa Nandy and Bridget Phillipson joined the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in handing out prizes to five charities that help those who fall through the cracks. Across the winners, a single theme stood out: the transformative power of a good job. But Britain is running out of those jobs. Vacancies are falling, unemployment has risen to 5 per cent, while a deeper crisis sits beneath both: nine million working age people are economically inactive, including more than four million on out-of-work benefits with ‘no work requirement’. Nearly every EU country has rebuilt its workforce since Covid; Britain has not. If we had…

Mr Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old elected mayor of New York, who has described the police as ‘racist, anti-queer and a major threat to public safety’, says that his top policy priority is implementing free universal childcare, taxing the wealthy, freezing rents, running buses for free and heaven knows what else. How very Marxist! The Greek comic writer Aristophanes (d. c. 386 BC) would have loved it. It was he who invented communism, after all, and had his audience in hysterics. His comedy Ecclesiazusae (‘Women Running the Assembly’) was produced in Athens in 391 BC. The women of Athens decide to seize power for themselves. They disguise themselves as men, enter the Assembly and, outnumbering the men, succeed in winning the vote and legislating as follows: all money and property will…

I should begin by making something clear. Splicing together two parts of a speech to give the impression they were one unbroken excerpt is a grave professional error, and would be viewed as such by any broadcaster in the business. The error would be egregious even if there were no suggestion it reinforced the accusation that Donald Trump was inciting riotous behaviour, simply because what viewers thought they witnessed did not occur. There is no excusing what Panorama did to Donald Trump’s 6 January 2021 speech. Nobody in the senior ranks of the BBC is to blame for not knowing about this at the time; but once it did become known, an immediate and unconditional apology should have been made. Crisply and severely dealt with, the story could have been…

Condemned leaders Former Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, for using lethal force against student protests last year. But on past records, she might yet live to an advanced age. The last national leader to be executed was Saddam Hussein in 2006, during the Allied occupation of Iraq. Other leaders sentenced to death in their country’s courts have fared better: — Emile Derlin Zinsou, installed as president of Dahomey (now Benin) after a coup in 1968, was sentenced to death in 1975. That was rescinded and he returned to Benin in 1990. He died aged 98 in 2016. — Chun Doo-hwan, who led a coup in South Korea in 1979, was sentenced to death in 1996, later commuted to life imprisonment. He died…

Defeat, political implosion and civil war – those are the jeopardies that Volodymyr Zelensky faces as Ukraine heads into the most difficult and probably the last winter of the war. Ever more effective Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure are likely to plunge swaths of the country into cold and darkness. Russian troops continue to push forwards slowly and bloodily in Donbas and, more dangerously, on the southern flank in Zaporizhzhia. Desertions from the Ukrainian army are up four times since last year and the number of deserters now matches the number of active fighters. The US has turned off the money taps and Europe struggles to produce the cash Kyiv needs to keep its war effort going. But the most damaging crisis of all is a $100…

A Fictional Inquiryby Daniele del Giudice, translated by Anne Milano Appel New Vessel, £14.99, pp. 146, A researcher arrives in Trieste to piece together the life of a well-known literary figure. In cafés, bookshops and hospitals he visits the friends and lovers who were part of the writer’s circle. Now dying themselves, they share echoes of a literary scene that has long since dispersed. Women recall how they were celebrated in poetry; men how their conversation sparkled. Someone remembers how the writer once asked if he might immortalise one of his witticisms in his work: ‘Forty years ago I made a joke in a bar, and he said “Oh that’s good! Will you give it to me? I want to put it in my novel.’” But the proposed novel never…

The School of Nightby Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin AitkenHarvill, £25, pp. 512 The fourth novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spooky supernatural series differs from the others in that it is a standalone and doesn’t involve previous characters. Gone, too, are the multiple narrators; and there is only the briefest mention of a new star in the sky – which in the other three books coincided with all sorts of inexplicable occurrences. But it is no less compelling. This is the story of an arrogant young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who arrives in London in 1985 to study photography at a prestigious art college. Though enthusiastic about his subject, he finds it hard to accept the constructive criticism of his lecturers. He is single-minded in his pursuit of success –…

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra/RattlePhilharmonic Hall, Liverpool Dead Man WalkingLondon Coliseum Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge of the senses. In Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, you felt your hairs tingle before you discerned a note. Seconds later, the very air within the hall seemed to be quivering with sensuous, engulfing bass warmth. You can be sure that Rattle anticipated that sensation; planned for it, in fact, from the moment that he confirmed this…

PluribusApple TV+ Death by LightningNetflix Pluribus is another drama set in the dystopian future. But on this occasion the integrity of the entire human race depends not on someone ordinary and likeable who could almost be you, but on a bolshie, misanthropic middle-aged lesbian called Carol. Carol (Rhea Seehorn from Better Call Saul) is so grumpy that when in flashback we see her wife Helen treating her to an expensive jaunt to a romantic ice hotel in Scandinavia, she refuses to snuggle beneath the fur bedspread, sip designer vodka and gaze at the Northern Lights above. Instead, all she wants to notice is that sitting on a bed made of blocks of ice makes her want to pee. But now Helen is gone and Carol is one of only 12…

I know where I’m going. I’m on the sleeper train chugging out of Euston and heading to Fort William. A wedding dress hangs on the wall in its transparent cover. I know from my printed itinerary that upon arrival at Fort William, there will be a car, then a ferry from Oban, and finally a gin and Dubonnet waiting for me at the Western Isles Hotel in Tobermory. But no one is getting married. Something much stranger than that is happening: an event that lies somewhere between a fandom convention and a secular pilgrimage. I’m on my way to the Outer Hebrides to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s masterpiece I Know Where I’m Going!. Powell had fallen in love with the Western Isles while making…

Sitting beneath the looming darkness of the unfinished ceiling of Westminster Cathedral, I found myself praying. I didn’t even know why, but I was walking past during a trip to London and I decided to go in, and I sat down, and then a priest came and began to say mass so I stayed, not knowing what was about to happen back in Ireland to the builder boyfriend, and not having any real feeling that you could call premonition – unless you count an overwhelming urge to be sitting in a cathedral praying, when I have passed there many times on similar trips and never once gone in. It was a lovely experience, except it seemed to me that it was shameful that we Catholics were allowing Jesus to hang…

It has been a week of alcoholic highlights, and, yes, I’ve made the most of it. Oh, don’t be like that, you sound like Mrs Ray with her tut-tut-tutting and eye-rolling. The Spectator Wine Club tour of Bordeaux was followed by a Rhône dinner with Domaine Vieux Télégraph, a champagne dinner with Virginie T, a fine whisky tasting with Boisdale and Duncan Taylor Whisky, a lunch with Springfontein and a weekend for 40 readers at Swinton Park in North Yorks. We had some great grub at Swinton, the tastiest of all dishes being roast grouse paired with a brace of contrasting Pinot Noirs, surely the best of all grapes to partner great British game. Fine Gamay also works well, especially after a few years in bottle, and I’m delighted to…

Q. I live in a small house in Hampstead and have taken in a friend of a friend as a lodger. He pays me a reduced rent for use of one of my spare bedrooms. I like him, but the agreement was that he would occupy the room for two nights a week; this, however, has started to slip into him being there for three, and often four, weeknights each week. I am livid but don’t know what to say to him. Neither I nor the friend who put us in touch with each other has any idea whether he is taking advantage of me or has just become forgetful. He is a widower. How do you think I should tackle this? – S.M., London NW3 A. Collude with an…