Sam Leith

2 days ago | spectator.com.au | Sam Leith

Grade: AIn the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether.

2 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Sam Leith

In the beginning, there was Doom. The videogame landscape was formless and void. But id Software created a square-headed space marine and several billion two-dimensional demons for him to kill with a shotgun, a chainsaw and a BFG (Big Fracking Gun); and several billion teenage boys saw that it was good, and they called it the First-Person Shooter, and lo, they gave up leaving their bedrooms altogether. The original Doom (1993) really was the genesis of a genre: dark, intense, relentless, addictive.

5 days ago | spectator.com.au | Sam Leith

Some wise person – I have a strong sense it may have been our own Christopher Fildes – once offered a compelling theory of the cyclical nature of financial crises. They happened, he argued, shortly after the last person at the bank to remember the most recent crash reached retirement age and cleared his desk.

5 days ago | spectator.co.uk | Sam Leith

Some wise person – I have a strong sense it may have been our own Christopher Fildes – once offered a compelling theory of the cyclical nature of financial crises. They happened, he argued, shortly after the last person at the bank to remember the most recent crash reached retirement age and cleared his desk. At this point, he said, the buccaneering young things who came after started to imagine that the recent period of stability and prosperity was the natural order of things.

1 week ago | spectator.com.au | Sam Leith

I’ve seen a lot of people, lately, making the case that the big problem with Sir Keir Starmer’s government is that its leader doesn’t know what he thinks. The case, essentially, is that he’s in perpetual campaign mode; and that rather than leading (as he’s elected to do) and making the case for the policies he believes are right, he is chasing the ignis fatuus of whatever he imagines to be public opinion.