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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Billy McMorris |Arabella Byrne |Kate Weinberg |Lara Prendergast
Alexandria, VirginiaBack in February, the first grader sustained a scrape that left a tiny red dot on her leg. She requested a soft cast and a medevac chopper. She settled for a dollar-store bandage. She shouldn’t have: it turns out she was quietly bleeding to death from the inside. She would have continued to deteriorate had we not been alarmed by a toilet clog the week after she fell. The Band-Aid was invented in 1920 by one Earle Dickson, a New Jersey cotton buyer with a clumsy wife.
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2 weeks ago | 
thespectator.com | Lara Prendergast
If you like piña coladas – and I do – Puerto Rico will suit you just fine. The cocktail was born on the island in 1954, though debate lingers over exactly where it was first dreamt up. A bartender at the Caribe Hilton is credited with blending coconut cream, pineapple and rum into its original form, but some claim it was at Barrachina that the drink evolved into the slushier, icier version we know today. But does it really matter?
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1 month ago | 
thespectator.com | Lara Prendergast |Jawad Iqbal |Jonathan Sacerdoti |Michael Evans
Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution.
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1 month ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Lara Prendergast
The art school at Marlborough looks different. When I was a pupil here in the mid-2000s, conceptual art was cool. Back then, art meant spray-painting a canvas with neon graffiti or making a sculpture out of rubbish. The art school would have been covered in all sorts of zany efforts at abstraction. What there would not have been, however, was much portraiture. And certainly not the abundance of remarkable portraits that now fill the walls. Something has changed.
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2 months ago | 
spectator.co.uk | Lara Prendergast
Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs.
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2 months ago | 
spectator.com.au | Lara Prendergast
Working at The Spectator brings you into contact with intriguing people. One who stands out is John R. Bradley. He started writing for this magazine in 2011 in the wake of the Arab Spring, having accurately predicted the Egyptian uprising three years earlier in his 2008 book Inside Egypt: The Road to Revolution in the Land of the Pharaohs.
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Jan 24, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Timothy Clark Jacobson |Olivia Potts |Jane Stannus |Lara Prendergast
These pages recently carried a lament for the little French restaurant, and the loss from the cities they once graced of a certain element of gentility and, yes, class. On the same subject, let us consider another era when class was valued more highly, and which produced the classiest, and the grandest, French restaurant of all. This requires a journey. In July 1936, a Chicago family, relations of mine, embarked on an unrushed two-month European vacation. A meticulous Thos.
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Jan 15, 2025 | 
thespectator.com | Douglas Murray |Michael Taube |Brendan O’Neill |Lara Prendergast
For a moment, it almost seemed like there was an outbreak of sense at the New York Times, with a column entitled “Dry January Is Driving Me to Drink.”The piece, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, an NYT columnist for the past three years, “known for her incisive essays on social problems,” begins by insisting that she is “happy” for people doing Dry January, but she won’t be joining them. Why? Because she likes a drink? Or because it’s performative?
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Dec 28, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Lara Prendergast
As we sat down at the Royal Opera House in London to watch one of the Royal Ballet’s soloists perform Letter to Tchaikovsky, an announcement began. “Tchaikovsky is understood to have been a gay man, who was forced by the conventions of society to marry a woman,” explained an earnest female voice from off-stage.
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Nov 30, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Olivia Potts |Matt Ridley |Jonathan Miller |Lara Prendergast
There is a gentle irony to the dish coquilles St. Jacques: a decadent, rich preparation of one of our most luxurious seafoods takes its name from a saint who has inspired centuries of pilgrimage, and whose emblem came to symbolize modesty. The eponymous St. Jacques is St. James the apostle, or James the Great.
