-
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.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Lee Cohen |Alexander Larman |Kara Kennedy |Justin Brierley
Imagine Prince Harry and Meghan Markle perched in their Montecito mansion, glowering at Donald Trump’s brazen, rebooted America. They’re not fleeing yet, but as progressive celebrities ditch Hollywood’s hills — Rosie O’Donnell settling in Ireland, Ellen DeGeneres nesting in Britain — might the Sussexes trail behind? We Yanks would rejoice. The spotlight sharpened last week when Harry’s US visa records hit the headlines on March 18, courtesy of a laudable Heritage Foundation lawsuit.
-
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.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Travis Elborough |Graeme Thomson Paul Thomson |Alexander Larman |Justin Brierley
When the Puerto Rican guitarist Carlos Alomar first met David Bowie, he didn’t think a man could turn a whiter shade of pale. The singer looked emaciated; his complexion teetered on translucency, and weighing only 95 pounds, the only signs of life were a pulse and a mop of orange hair. It was the mid-Seventies, and Bowie was touring America deep in the throes of addiction — the “darkest years” of his life — surviving on a paltry diet of red peppers, cigarettes, milk and cocaine.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Freddy Gray |James Orr |Charles Lipson |Justin Brierley
You wouldn’t expect the Kennedy Center to exactly love J.D. Vance. But that doesn’t make the audience’s reaction to him showing up there on Thursday any less extraordinary. Vance went to the Kennedy Center with his wife Usha, to watch a performance by the National Symphony Orchestra, perhaps expecting a genteel evening at one of Washington’s most high-brow venues. Instead, the audience acted like a mob, booing him as he took his seat in a box.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Dot Wordsworth |Teresa Mull |Ben Domenech |Justin Brierley
“No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,” declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him, as a doctor, about something Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had said in 2012, according to a report published in the New York Times last year.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Roger Kimball |Nicholas Farrell |Toby Young |Justin Brierley
On April 26, 1336, the poet Petrarch, accompanied by his younger brother, climbed up the windy slopes of Mount Ventoux in the Rhône Valley. He said that he was the first person to climb that Alps-adjacent peak, which isn’t quite true. But it may well be true that he was the first person to go mountain climbing for fun.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Peter Jones |Ross Clark |Justin Brierley |Grace Curley
How does one attempt to console people on the destruction of their homes, a fate recently visited on so many citizens of North Carolina and Los Angeles? Seneca, the millionaire philosopher and advisor to the emperor Nero, associated consolation with “reprimanding, dissuading, exhorting, commending.”He exemplifies that in a letter musing on the reaction that his friend Liberalis had to the destruction by fire of his beloved Lugdunum (Lyon) in Gaul ad 64.
-
1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Edward Howell |Henry Hitchings |Philip Patrick |Justin Brierley
Month after month, it just kept plummeting. The South Korean birth rate last year earned the not-so-holy prize for being the lowest in the world. The demographic crisis faced by South Korea seems hardly the hallmark of the country’s self-proclaimed status as a “global pivotal state.” That said, the country’s fertility rate rose incrementally to a high of 0.75 births per woman in 2024, marking the first time in nine years that any such uptick has been seen.
-
2 months ago | 
thespectator.com | Dot Wordsworth |Justin Brierley |Grace Curley |Max Jeffery
My husband was so excited about learning the term perigee–syzygy that he kept saying it over and over, until the words blended into his regular breathing and he dozed off in his chair. The compound word describes what the vulgar press calls a supermoon. A syzygy happens when the Moon, Earth and sun line up, creating a full moon (or a new moon, which we can’t see because only the far side gets lit up). The perigee is when the moon comes closest to Earth (its farthest point is called the apogee).
