Place Lisbon

May 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Sam Kriss |Martin Vander Weyer |Place Lisbon |Amy Everett

The American artist and critic Brad Troemel once pointed out that art galleries have all turned into a kind of adult daycare, and ever since then I haven’t been able to visit a gallery without noticing it. Nearly two decades ago, Carsten Höller installed a set of big aluminum slides in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, and they were undeniably good fun because going down slides is fun. It’s also fun, although maybe for a different type of person, to ask if going down slides counts as art.

May 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Martin Vander Weyer |Place Lisbon |Amy Everett |Fergus Butler-Gallie

The US crackdown on trade finance for Russia from international banks — designed to impede imports needed for the continuing assault on Ukraine — is biting hard, reports the FT, quoting an investor who thinks “the logical endpoint of this is turning Russia into Iran.” Quite right too: sanctions like these are a vital non-military way to hobble Vladimir Putin’s campaign. But war and finance intersect in many different ways.

May 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Dot Wordsworth |Place Lisbon |Amy Everett |Fergus Butler-Gallie

Why do people say: “You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment”? Are they using it as they would a Shakespearean quotation such as “The lady doth protest too much?” Or do they think that by speaking the line made famous by Ian Richardson in the original House of Cards they generate wit anew so that some rubs off on them and cheers the conversation? I wondered whether I was encountering second-hand humor from some television series when I began to notice the phrase Wait. What?

May 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Andrew Watts |Place Lisbon |Amy Everett |Fergus Butler-Gallie

I miss kippers. My wife won’t let me eat them at home, and they have become a rarity in restaurants. I stayed in a luxury hotel last month, and the manager was telling me that if I wanted anything — valet parking, room service, breakfast after 10:30 a.m. — I had only to ask. When I enquired if kippers were on the menu, he went as white as unsmoked cod and mumbled that the head of housekeeping had forbidden them because of the luxury soft furnishings.

May 15, 2024 | thespectator.com | Calla Jones Corner |Place Lisbon |Amy Everett |Fergus Butler-Gallie

The new prime minister of France, Gabriel Attal, has promised to “take care” of Oradour-sur-Glane. The village, in west-central France, was the scene on June 10, 1944, of an infamous Nazi massacre of 643 men, women and children, shot or locked in the local church and burned alive. Only six villagers escaped to tell the tale; the last of them died in 2023. For years Oradour-sur-Glane has been a site where schoolchildren were taken to learn about what France endured during World War Two.