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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Susie Mesure |Mathew Lyons |Anne Sebba |Christopher Sandford
Beartooth, the second novel by the Montana-based writer Callan Wink, opens with two brothers elbow-deep in the viscera of the third black bear they have just shot out of season. Hazan’s hands are “moving around the hot insides of the animal as if he were rummaging through a junk drawer.” He wants the gallbladder, which will fetch around $1,500 — far more than the brothers get for chopping firewood. The skull, claws and skin will swell their illegal bounty by another $500.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Mathew Lyons |Christopher Sandford |Octavia Sheepshanks |Amelia Butler-Gallie
Fans of that beloved British cultural institution Doctor Who are wont to talk about “their” doctor — that is, which iteration of the character was their entry point to the franchise. The same might be said of fans of Neil Innes, the much-loved songwriter, musician and comedian who died in 2019, aged seventy-five.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Henry Hitchings |Ian Sansom |Francesca Peacock
In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells.
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2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Ben Domenech |Christopher Sandford |Freddy Gray |Juan P. Villasmil
My friend Dan Foster voiced a theory about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today that strikes me as particularly accurate. In response to a comment from the New York Times’s Ross Douthat giving credence to RFK’s belief that Lyme disease could be the result of a materially engineered bioweapon, he noted: “The reason I think Kennedy gets confirmed is because every single American agrees with him on one of his fringe things.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Harding |Casey Chalk |John Connolly |Christopher Sandford
The United States of China, anyone? The idea that a federal China might be able to accommodate within it a relatively autonomous Taiwan is one of the more radical solutions mooted to the thorny problem of Taiwan’s status. The difficulty, of course, is that neither the Chinese Communist Party nor Taiwan’s leaders would find such an outcome remotely acceptable.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford |Roger Kimball |Ben Domenech |Amber Duke
In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Scott Bradfield |Teresa Mull |Christopher Sandford |Philip Womack
For those of us who have long loved (or hated) Paradise Lost, this is one of those rare and refreshing books that invites us to compare our feelings with other committed readers over the centuries. The poem may well be the only major work in the western canon that nobody can avoid for long — even if it comes down to making a decision not to read it at all, or just to give up trying.
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Jan 9, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Allan Mallinson |Christopher Sandford |Philip Womack |James Campbell
Who could forget the Polish squadrons in RAF Fighter Command when, in the 1969 film The Battle of Britain, a British squadron leader, frustrated by the excited radio chatter on being allowed into action at last, orders “Silence! In Polish!” Or the Polish Parachute Brigade at Arnhem, whose commander, Stanislaw Sosabowski, played by Gene Hackman in A Bridge Too Far (1977), thinking the venture disastrous, growls “God Bless Field Marshal Montgomery” as he jumps from his Dakota?
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Peter Jones |Riva-Melissa Tez |Christopher Sandford |Julie Burchill
The “lifestyle guru” Russell Brand is now under police investigation and (in desperation?) has taken to hawking magic amulets. Still, it has to be better than his announcement that he had become a Christian. As the Greek satirist Lucian pointed out, such a move did little good for one such would-be “celeb” (Latin celeber, “busy, crowded”), Peregrinus. He was born c. AD 95 and, suspected of killing his father, went into exile.
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Dec 26, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Christopher Sandford
The title of this book may offer a clue to its prevailing tone. There’s a certain amount of showbiz gossip involved, but it is essentially a protracted rumination of the “What’s it all about, Alfie?” variety, with plenty of unflinching discourse on matters such as spirituality, depression, addiction and the precariousness of the human condition. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” the authors write near the end of their tale of untold material privilege and wrenching emotional grief.
