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Sep 30, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Sean Thomas |Juan P. Villasmil |Austin Williams |Laurie Graham
In Cambodia, everybody is looking forward to Bon Om Touk. If your Khmer is a bit rusty, this means the mid-autumn New Moon Water Festival, celebrated in late October. This fervent, noisy, firework-banging festival has multiple, colorful meanings. For a start, it marks the end of the endless summer rain — which turns everyone’s laundry moldy and gets a tad annoying.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Olivia Potts |Charles Lipson |James Lewisohn |Laurie Graham
I am sure there are beloved British dishes that inspire horror in those from different cultures, that are truly unappealing to the uninitiated. I can quite imagine that the bright green eel-gravy that traditionally accompanies the East End pie and mash could be figuratively and literally hard to swallow.
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Sep 14, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Laurie Graham |Charles Lipson |Ben Domenech |Sebastian Shakespeare
Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy snacks that was to serve as my lunch, my travel companions began unwrapping their own picnics. Some, like me, had made hasty and unappetizing purchases at the station. Others had carefully curated lunches, assembled earlier in the day from our hotel’s lavish breakfast buffet. Well-filled rolls, pieces of fruit, pastries. In they tucked.
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Aug 19, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Harry Cluff |Amber Duke |Jonathan Spyer |Laurie Graham
As Enoch Powell pointed out, “all political careers end in failure.” More often than not, those failures are self-inflicted. Without Partygate, for example, Boris Johnson might still be Britain’s prime minister. Although the debacle may not have been the final nail in his professional coffin, it certainly arranged the wake. His fans and critics alike were infuriated by the idea of public servants living it up while the rest of the nation was locked down during Covid in May 2020.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Hannah Moore |Olivia Potts |Laurie Graham |Nicholas Farrell
In Spain you can eat all day — and we did. Earlier in the summer, I spent two days in Andalusia, and most of the forty-eight hours were taken up by mealtimes. A breakfast of the sweet porridge poleá started the day, then ham-tasting for a mid-morning snack followed by a two-hour lunch. I didn’t think it was possible to eat all day, but when the food is this good and meticulously chosen, it is.
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Jul 18, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Bill Kauffman |Lisa Haseldine |againBy Cockburn |Laurie Graham
Can one egregiously bad scene ruin an otherwise great movie? When I go on an early 1970s jag — revisiting the golden age of American cinema — I can never bring myself to rewatch Five Easy Pieces (1970), in which Jack Nicholson plays an upper-middle-class piano prodigy turned downwardly mobile oil field worker. It’s a fine character study poisoned, for me, by the famous scene in which a petulant Nicholson berates a diner waitress who stubbornly refuses his request to add tomatoes to his omelet.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Harry Cluff |Laurie Graham |Nicholas Farrell |Orson Fry
On June 8, 1924, veteran climber and geologist Noel Odell mounted the crest of a Himalayan crag and gazed up toward the tallest peak on Earth. Taking in the awe-inspiring sight, he noticed two tiny “objects” far ahead on a snowy slope “going strongly for the top.” To Odell, a trained and talented observer, the pair of ascending dots appeared to be a mere thousand feet or so below the summit.
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Jun 17, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Ben Goldsmith |Jonathan Miller |Nigel Jones |Laurie Graham
I recently found myself scrolling World Cement Weekly in search of news of a massive rewilding project in northern Mexico, created and funded by the cement giant Cemex. The growing success of the rewilding movement is strangely little known — though there are now places that are wilder, more vibrant, more teeming with life than they have been for centuries, few outside the movement know anything about them.
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Mar 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Damian Reilly |Aaron Gwyn |Theodore Dalrymple |Laurie Graham
For an astonishing length of time the attitude of soccer authorities to the prospect of widespread doping at the sport’s highest levels seemed best summed up in a 2017 tweet by the often spectacularly dim-seeming former pro and Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker. “Doping is not really an issue in football. Doping doesn’t help players play better.
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Mar 3, 2024 | 
thespectator.com | Aaron Gwyn |Theodore Dalrymple |Laurie Graham |Tom Hodgkinson
At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.
