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1 week ago | 
thespectator.com | Aidan Hartley |Estella Shardlow |Justin Brierley |Grace Curley
Laikipia, KenyaI am grateful to David, a reader of this column, who kindly sent me a packet of old Kenya maps his father used when the family lived in Nairobi in the 1960s. David’s envelope took about six months to reach my postbox, which is good going, since I’ve received other letters posted several years before. I adore maps and own lots, rolled up in tubes, hanging on walls, with piles of them folded in drawers, dog-eared, rain-stained and scribbled on.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Mary Wakefield |Arabella Byrne |Raheem Kassam |Aidan Hartley
I don’t like cats. I don’t like their reptilian stealth, or the way their heads are set low and poke out from their bodies. I don’t like the constant showing off of their puckered bums, or their disregard for the normal rules of mammal eye contact. There are roughly 74 million cats in the United States and until recently I found it inexplicable. Why would anyone choose to love and nurture a psycho that dismembers songbirds, often torturing them first in a casual, playful way?
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Catriona Olding |Cosmo Landesman |Aidan Hartley |Rory Sutherland
ProvenceMolly MacCarthy launched the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in the spring of 1920 with two aims. The first was to bring together the old Bloomsbury set who’d been dissipated by World War One and the second was to encourage her dilatory husband, Desmond, to write his memoir. She was successful in the first but not the second.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Aidan Hartley |Arabella Byrne |Rory Sutherland |Bill Kauffman
In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown of Malindi, in Kenya. I realize it must be odd for him, because so much has changed in the decades since he died. He keeps shaking his head in disbelief at the thronging crowds of modern Africa and all the buildings, the vanished forests, the once-empty bush and all the other things that have changed.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Ross Anderson |Aidan Hartley |James Delingpole |Anne De Courcy
Last Friday afternoon, amid the menswear shows for Paris Fashion Week, a crowd of influencers, shoppers, celebrities and fashion journalists waited for Dior’s latest collection. Attendees, however, weren’t chatting about what they expected from the clothes, or the staging, or the state of the brand, or what they were hoping to see. Instead, it was all about the fate of its designer.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Aidan Hartley |Isabel Hardman |Jane Stannus |Justin Brierley
Malindi, KenyaIn 1967, Tanzania’s socialist rulers seized all my parents’ property — their ranchland, their home and their cattle — and overnight my father saw the fruits of all his labor taken from him. He had no time to dwell on his misfortune, since he had a wife and four children to support, so at the age of sixty he picked himself up and vanished off to work in Somalia.
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Dec 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Aidan Hartley
Ouidah, BeninOn a free afternoon in Benin, I decide to walk the slave route in Ouidah, the port from which perhaps a million Africans were transported on the Middle Passage to the Americas. Near the old slave market or Place Chacha, named in memory of the slaver Francisco Félix de Souza, about whom Bruce Chatwin wrote a book, I encounter a group of black Americans following the same path.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Philip Hensher |Roger Kimball |Ben Domenech |Aidan Hartley
BerlinJust as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left and I took his place in the chair before the mirror. “Now, sir,” Burak said, with an ingratiating formality not quite his own.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |LifeThe politics |Aidan Hartley |Matt Ridley
Where will conservatives and Donald Trump’s disciples spend their non-working hours in DC for the president-elect’s term? The Washingtonian provided a list by Jessica Sidman last week, but by Cockburn’s estimation, it’s not totally over the target. Contenders on Sidman’s list include the Big Board, Cafe Milano, Capital Grille, Dirty Water, RPM Italian, Royal Sands Social Club, Shelly’s Back Room and the Waldorf Astoria — which used to be the Trump Hotel DC but was sold back in 2021.
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Nov 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Aidan Hartley |Alexander Larman |Matthew Lynn |LifeThe politics
Africa Orientale Italiana“Where did you get those glasses?” a stylish Italian gentleman asked me, gesturing at the acetate L.G.R. frames I wear for my myopia. I said Nairobi. “Good,” he said, “I make them.” Luca Gnecchi Ruscone and I then had a conversation that brought back fond memories of adventures across the Horn of Africa, all focused through a history of spectacle lenses.
