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1 week ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Ian Williams |Curtis Yarvin
Charlie Brooker’s cautionary technological tales have now been running for well over a decade, and they are almost in danger of seeming old-fashioned. When Black Mirror began in 2011, Instagram was only a few months old, the iPhone was a new novelty just coming into the mainstream, and Elon Musk was best known for being CEO of Tesla. Now, virtually everything in the world has changed, and Big Tech plays roles in our lives that the ever-cynical Brooker could barely have imagined.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Lee Langley |Alex Peake-Tomkinson
Whisper it, very quietly, but the now 87-year-old author Thomas Pynchon is having something of a moment in 2025. Not only has his 1990 novel Vineland supposedly served as the loose inspiration for the eagerly awaited new Paul Thomas Anderson-Leonardo DiCaprio collaboration One Battle After Another,but the near-impossible has been announced: Pynchon will publish a new novel, entitled Shadow Ticket,around the time of the movie’s release.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Jenny McCartney |Dot Wordsworth
At the beginning of the debut episode of Meghan Markle’s new podcast, she is keen to assert her own identity. After flirting with tradwifedom in her most recent Netflix show With Love, Meghan, she is now casting off her brief nomenclature of “Meghan Sussex,” but nor should you refer to The Artist Formerly Known As The Duchess of Sussex as “Meghan Markle” any longer.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Lee Cohen |Matthew Dennison
On April Fool’s Day, it is all too appropriate that the latest announcement from the Duchess of Sussex has the grim air of a not particularly funny joke.
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3 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Piers Morgan |Ben Domenech
Last year, I wrote a feature for this magazine in which, disturbed by the apparent revival in the British gangster genre, I counseled a degree of caution as to its practitioners’ apparent lack of discernment in their approach to the tropes and clichés of the tradition.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Lee Cohen |Philip Hensher
Earlier this week, I tried and failed to purchase a couple of items from the As Ever range that the Duchess of Sussex has been touting in her ill-fated Netflix show. I won’t lie, Spectator readers; my dedication to bringing you the latest hard-hitting investigative news was tempered by the hope that such condiments as the “limited edition wildflower honey with honeycomb” and the “shortbread cookies with flower sprinkles” would end up being perfectly edible.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Matthew Dennison |Kara Kennedy
Earlier this week, I tried and failed to purchase a couple of items from the As Ever range that the Duchess of Sussex has been touting in her ill-fated Netflix show. I won’t lie, Spectator readers; my dedication to bringing you the latest hard-hitting investigative news was tempered by the hope that such condiments as the “limited edition wildflower honey with honeycomb” and the “shortbread cookies with flower sprinkles” would end up being perfectly edible.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |cocaineBy James Delingpole |Justin Brierley
At one point during the part-concert film, part-documentary Hans Zimmer & Friends: Diamond in the Desert, super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer refers to Hans Zimmer as “the greatest living film composer in the world.” Zimmer, present when such flattery is offered, does not exactly nod in agreement, but nor does he laugh it off.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Jenny McCartney |Jasper Rees
If you would like to see that rarest of endangered species — a smart, witty and original 90-minute thriller aimed at adults — then stop reading this review immediately and go and see Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. It is a film that is probably best enjoyed by going in entirely blind, where the bare bones of the premise, revolving around a husband-and-wife pair of British spies who find themselves under suspicion of treachery, possibly by one another, is all you need to know.
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Alexander Larman |Byron’s Women |Deborah Ross |Anne Daniel
The extraordinary success of The Brutalist is not something that Hollywood, or anyone else, anticipated. When it was announced for last year’s Venice Film Festival, it was regarded with a degree of interest but not much else. After all, Brady Corbet’s previous two films — The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux — had attracted a degree of critical attention but neither had been an awards player, let alone making any money at the box office.
