Spectator Life | The Spectator

Britain’s National Health Service believes in fairness – they treat everyone with equal contempt

Edward Gibbon was troubled by a swelling in his lower abdomen. I have the same condition. “Wow. That’s huge,” said my GP as he gazed at the affected area. “Huge?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I wouldn’t know. It’s the only one I’ve ever seen.” My cyst has been expanding steadily for decades and I was told a few years ago that its intentions were peaceful. My new GP was trying to scare me, obviously. I don’t blame him. It’s dull work staring at sick bodies all day and he was trying to amuse himself with a spot of scaremongering. “You’ll need a scan within two weeks,” he added. “Cancerous perhaps?” I asked. He nodded with a sly grin.

Henry Jeffreys

The secret to dressing exceptionally well

As I scribble these words on a train to London, I’m wearing a lightweight Italian wool suit, a shirt from Gieves & Hawkes, a silk spotty tie and a pair of Church’s suede brogues. You might mistake me for a prosperous Neapolitan gentleman of a certain age. But in fact, I’m a charity-shop dandy – my outfit came to less than £60. That’s less than a pair of new trainers for my teenage daughter. I’m particularly pleased with the shoes, which I picked up locally for £30. A new pair would set you back £700. If you’re not too grand to buy secondhand, it’s actually far easier and cheaper for men to dress smartly than to be slovenly. I learned this important fact in my early twenties.

June 26, 2026

Catriona Olding

The highs and lows of life as an artist

Provence “Painting is a stupid job. Do something useful and train to be a nurse,” commented a man beneath a column I wrote last month. Although well used to the vitriol leveled at artists from some quarters, I found this particularly annoying. I was a general nurse from 1981 to 1985, after which I completed psychiatric training and spent five years working in acute psychiatry in the East End of Glasgow. That was followed by a year as a district nurse and seven more as a practice sister. I nursed because my lower-middle-class background, with its discouragements and lack of contacts, didn’t equip me even to consider somehow making a living from the two things I’d loved most since I was a child: books and art.

June 25, 2026

Olivia Potts

Chicken Milanese is the king of homemade fast food

When it comes to home cooking, we’re obsessed with optimization. Today this manifests itself in reels on Instagram offering a "hack" to make the time you spend in your kitchen shorter and your dinner to arrive more quickly. Harder, faster, better, stronger. None of this is new: there was a time when every Jamie Oliver cookbook shaved ten minutes of the promised cooking time off the last. Delia Smith’s How to Cheat at Cooking caused a public outcry (can you believe she advocated for frozen mashed potato?). The whole appeal of air fryers is that they’re fast, and while slow cookers don’t exactly get to their destination quickly, they do so with as little intervention as possible from the cook.

June 24, 2026

Gavin Mortimer

The French love affair with Scotland

France’s summer smash at the cinema is set to be a comedy called The Perfects. It opens next week with an all-star cast that includes Scottish actor Alan Cumming. The Perfects are a family of con-artists who flee France to escape the police and they end up in Scotland where madcap adventures in tartan ensue. It’s further proof that France can’t get enough of Bonnie Scotland. Films, television documentaries, newspaper features and even a puff piece earlier this month on the primetime lunchtime news about a visit to the most isolated pub in Scotland. Billy Connolly once famously likened Scottish folk singers to ‘singing shortbread tins," churning out clichéd lyrics about mountains, heather and a Roamin' in the Gloamin.’ "Garbage!

June 22, 2026

Nancy Alsop

I’m being bullied by Duolingo

For the past 264 days, I have been hounded by a merciless small green owl. If I were to share this with friends, troubled whispers about my mental wellbeing would soon strike up. Disquieted, they might even cart me off to the hellscape of a wellness intervention. And yet this malevolent bird is entirely real. It is there when I unload the dishwasher, lamenting its disappointment in my efforts; and it is there when I put my daughter to bed, warning that it is about to become "very angry." Yes, Duolingo is an insidious Jiminy Cricket on modern shoulders – except that it lives in our pockets and, rather than dispensing wisdom, is an emotionally blackmailing shame merchant with rage issues. It wasn’t always this way.

Philip Patrick

Why Japanese students aren’t woke

One of the joys of living in Japan is the lack of wokeness. It is not that it doesn’t exist – there is a Tokyo Pride, the odd Gaza protest, and gender equality is increasingly discussed – it’s simply that the concept doesn’t quite translate. Like the strikes that only take place at the weekend so as not to inconvenience customers, woke protesters here are tiny in number, generally polite and devoid of the threatening aggressiveness of the West. And diversity isn’t really a thing. Maybe that’s another reason tourist numbers have exploded. You can get away from all that here… The young in particular seem charmingly oblivious to the culture wars, and universities are generally safe spaces for the woke-phobic.

June 18, 2026

Zoe Strimpel

Meet my snooty AI sommelier

My grandparents’ home was a proper house, on the cusp of Hampstead Heath in North London, with roses and flagstones at the front. It was the sort that looked like it housed a robust wine collection – solid on account of good, aged European bottles, bought at a time when standards were, one assumes, higher. There was one bottle in my grandfather’s possession that came with particular fanfare: a 1974 Bordeaux whose label was so far gone you couldn’t see exactly what it was. As a treat, I arranged to have the sommelier of the Connaught Hotel examine and open it. Once the cork gave way, a thud of brown sediment rocked the bottle. It was decanted and it breathed – inasmuch as a long-dead thing can breathe. Still hopeful, we tried the sherry-looking stuff – and it was nasty.

June 17, 2026

Daniel Seifert

Why do I get stuck with bores at parties?

There are a handful of obsessive mania-types I can get along with swimmingly. Kleptos, heavy-drinking dipsos and nymphos to name a few. But at monomaniacs, I draw the line. Give me anything, anyone, at a social occasion — but not a one-topic conversation. Why is it that the fewer interests people have, the more boring they become? One wonders what history’s great Renaissance men would have made of today’s crypto bros or blockchain fanatics. I pick on blockchain because, as with so many problems benighting the world, technology is to blame. I’m no Luddite, but I hereby shame content algorithms in the strongest of biblical terms saying, Verily, ye have spawned dullards.

June 15, 2026

Graeme Thomson

None of McCartney’s new songs will trouble his setlist for long

On May 30, 1966, the Beatles released “Paperback Writer” – a fortnight after “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones and only days before Bob Dylan released “I Want You” as a single. Paul Simon wrote and recorded (with Art Garfunkel) “A Hazy Shade of Winter” not long after. Yes, yes, what bliss it was in that dawn etc. But anyone predicting back then that, 60 years later, all four artists would still be releasing new music and touring to large and appreciative audiences would have been laughed clean out of the Bag O’Nails. Even when glossy monthly music magazines such as Q started appearing in the 1980s, 40 was regarded as the dark side of the moon for the foundational pop stars of the 1960s.

Josh Sims

Why are we still seduced by wealth?

Show me the money. Show it to me in the dedicated pages of national newspapers, in documentaries and TV series and on social media, where influencers make their money by showing me the money. Let me revel in all the clichés we’re offered – the poorer man’s idea of wealth, defined by supercars and mega-yachts, houses pent and country, dinky handbags and preposterous watches, fat cigars, deep tans, Tic Tac teeth and honed abs, for even the body is performative of money these days. Tom Wolfe would be slack-jawed. Forty years ago he coined the sadly forgotten term "plutography," to capture the then prevailing trend for the publishing business to offer readers a monthly dose of full-color insight into how the other half lived.

June 13, 2026

Josie Cox

My Memorial Day pilgrimage to a Pennsylvania Walmart

Here in the US, Memorial Day – which falls on the last Monday in May – is, officially, an occasion for mourning and honoring military personnel who have given their lives in service to this great country. Unofficially, it is an occasion for charred hot dogs, 24-packs of Bud Light and nationalistic merchandising usually confined to airport gift shops. In our household, however, Memorial Day marks something different entirely. It’s the day we make our annual pilgrimage into the heart of consumer capitalism: a Walmart in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. By now you might know that I live in Manhattan. You might, therefore, be wondering why exactly we’ve adopted this strange ritual, necessarily involving a rental car and gridlocked traffic on the George Washington Bridge.

June 12, 2026

James Delingpole

Why I’m increasingly drawn to optimistic sci-fi

You know you’re getting old when you see Geena Davis from Thelma & Louise cast as a granny sex symbol and Alfred Molina as a character so elderly you’re supposed to believe that he could drop at any time. This is one of the running gags of The Boroughs, a sci-fi/monster series set in an upmarket, Stepford Wives-esque desert retirement village, and clearly aimed at aging farts like I very nearly am who imagine themselves to be much younger and groovier than they now are. “Don’t worry, wrinkly kids,” the series reassures us. “By the time you hit your seventies you’ll be taking more drugs and having more sex – even crazy, orgy sex [note to squeamish viewers: this scene takes place off camera] – than ever before.

Flora Watkins

Tequila slammers all around!

“Tequila, it makes me happy, / Con Tequila it feels fine” goes the student anthem by Terrorvision. It is midnight, somewhere around the turn of the new millennium, and we are on the sticky dancefloor of a grotty union bar in Edinburgh, but it could be Bristol, Cambridge or Newcastle. You get the picture. The song is greeted by whoops and an influx of revelers throwing drunken shapes. Meanwhile, some bastard in your friendship group who’s feeling flush is already elbowing his way to the bar to spank part of the student loan that’s just hit his account on a bottle of José Cuervo tequila, shot glasses, lemons and salt. Slammers all round! Bleurrggghhhhh.

Jimmy Nicholls

The politically incorrect heyday of 2000s gaming

Some years ago, a childhood friend of mine was playing the racing game TOCA on the Xbox. It had, for its time, a decent line in realistic car collisions, allowing an inept driver to ruin the race of a competitor. Such was my friend’s dexterity, an irate Australian man said he hoped my friend would get "nonced." Character building, as my mom would say, though I doubt she’d be entirely approving of the rambunctious culture of online gaming during my teenage years. Playing online in those days meant exposing yourself to commentary that could at best be called "robust." And luckily for worried mothers, the government is here to help.

Patrick Smith

Why I take frog poison

You picture the rainforest, naturally. A clearing at first light, a shaman with thousand-yard eyes, the canopy screeching overhead. What you do not picture is a fourth-floor flat on an east London estate, a woman wafting sage around your head and the slow realization that you have just handed over £150 to be – quite literally – poisoned. This is kambo. And at the lowest ebb of my late thirties, becalmed in a miasma of self-loathing and suffering from PTSD following a moped accident in Thailand, I had decided it was precisely what I needed. Made from the dried skin secretions of a giant monkey frog, it is also, as of last month, suspected of having killed its first Briton.

June 9, 2026

Alexander Larman

The political awkwardness of the 2026 Tony Awards

Every year, the American theater world gathers in New York to celebrate the best of the best, and every year, writers like me ask why the judges have made increasingly baffling decisions. On the surface, it seems as if the 79th Tony Awards, hosted by Pink from Radio City Music Hall, were business as usual. The new revival of Death of a Salesman, with Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf and directed by Joe Mantello, was the big winner with six awards including Best Revival and Best Featured Actress. It also represented the partial redemption of the once-powerful, now-humbled super-producer Scott Rudin, whose penchant for big-star vehicles based on classic novels and plays was evident.

Alexander Larman

It’s time to turn the page on ‘romantasy’

I wrote recently about my delight that an excellent second-hand bookshop has opened in my home city of Oxford. Well, karma has come around. In the upmarket district of Jericho, it’s recently been announced that Britain’s first "romantasy bookshop," Bad Girl Books, will open next month. The shop is run by an American expatriate named Starlin Marot and is the permanent manifestation of a series of pop-up events she ran in London that have attracted thousands of readers. Marot told the Oxford Mail: "The reason I like the romantasy genre so much is because it is so inclusive and empowering. It can be empowering to celebrate stories written by women, which feature women's voices and desires. I'm really looking forward to meeting lots of new customers.

Sean Thomas

Why have we forgotten about Covid?

Deep in the honeycombed limestone caves of Slovenia, Croatia, and Friulian Italy, there is a fantastical creature called "the olm," also known as "the baby dragon." It was once an ordinary salamander, which probably fell down into the karstic caverns – where it has evolved into an eerie pink creature that lives for a century, eats once a decade, possesses eyes without sight, lives permanently in a larval condition – called "neoteny" by zoologists – and has been recorded sitting in the exact same place for seven years, without moving. Why do I mention the olm? Because, as I travel the world, I’m increasingly wondering if we humans, Homo sapiens – have turned into a peculiar higher primate version of the olm.

June 5, 2026

Sean Thomas

The classical beauty of the ‘Turkish Riviera’

I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road. Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth.

May 30, 2026

Daniel Seifert

Forties’ love: tennis serves me a perfect midlife crisis

There comes a time when every man must choose how to tackle an impending midlife crisis. A Maserati? A marathon? A mistress? Lacking the wealth, stamina or sheer Italian-ness for any of the above, I’ve plumped for that most gentile of sports to feel alive again: tennis. The problem with a new hobby, of course, is that you immediately feel more infantile than raffishly young. Picking up fresh skills means relearning how to learn, decades after university, when you actually had the appetite for self-improvement. Sure, tennis is, as studies have found, one of the most effective activities for staying healthy. But it’s also infuriatingly finicky. Technique-wise, I can fire off a decent groundstroke (forehand and backhand), thanks to lessons as a mopey teen.

May 29, 2026

James Delingpole

I’m done with Rivals

Everybody has been raving about Legends, the Netflix series about undercover customs officers in the 1990s busting a heroin ring. But even though it’s "based on a true story," there are times when it feels more like a histrionically implausible, over-reverential recruitment drive for HM Customs and Excise. "Thought they were just those men in white shirts embarrassing you at the airport by exposing the stash of cheap baccy hidden in your holiday underwear? Think again!" you can imagine the tagline running. The model here, of course, would be Top Gun – the 1986 movie, heavily supported by the US military, which supposedly caused the number of men applying to become US Navy fighter pilots to increase by 500 percent (a figure that’s since been debunked).

Piers Morgan

No one likes Arsenal, we don’t care

Arsenal’s triumph in finally winning the Premier League again after 22 long, often eyeball-wrenchingly tortuous years has gone down like one of Keir Starmer’s motivational “I’m not leaving!” speeches, which is ironic given the Prime Minister is an avid Gooner like me. It’s hard to understand why a club that boasts a fanbase including us, Jeremy Corbyn, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, the late Osama bin Laden and Prince Harry (whose matchday allegiance has followed a similar path to his royal duties, in that he never turns up) attracts such opprobrium that we were recently named the “most-hated supporters” in the league. But as with Millwall in their hooligan heyday, if no one likes us, we don’t care.

May 28, 2026

Lynn Barber

Was Marcel Duchamp’s notorious ‘Fountain’ even his own work?

This slim volume has only one fault. It has no illustrations. So you’ll have to do some Googling or visit the current Duchamp exhibition at MoMA (until August 22) if you want to know what "The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even" looks like. Otherwise it’s perfect – wittily written and packed with many fascinating characters besides the ever intriguing Marcel Duchamp. He didn’t actually arrive in New York until 1915, but when he did he found himself already famous. His "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2" had been included in the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, alongside works by Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse and Braque, and completely stole the show. Duchamp didn’t even know the painting was being exhibited.

May 27, 2026

Theo Zenou

Meet the anti-Gretas: the women celebrating nuclear energy

Over the course of their lives, Americans have an average carbon footprint of 1,300 tons of CO2. Paris Ortiz-Wines, a young woman from San Francisco, has already canceled hers out. She could hop on a flight every week for the rest of her life, eat ribeyes at every meal and sip almond milk all day long, and still be in the clear. Back in 2021, Ortiz-Wines played a key role in the campaign that stopped the closure of California’s only nuclear power plant, Diablo Canyon. This has already saved more than 30 million tons of CO2 emissions. Ortiz-Wines is part of a new generation of women advocating for nuclear energy, even though surveys show most women are skeptics. Call them the Nuclear Power Rangers.

Nicholas Farrell

Our local nudists are running wild

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna It was midnight, more or less, and my middle daughter, Magdalena, 18, said with all the untroubled bravado of youth: "Let’s go and find il rospo!" She was at the wheel of the Land Rover Defender and we were involved in a nocturnal driving lesson. Rospo is Italian for toad. And if you say "Dio Rospo" ("Toad God"), that’s blasphemy, so as a good Catholic she doesn’t, whereas, as a bad one, I do because it is funny, as God would surely agree. We drove on slowly, passing half a dozen or so parked cars with solitary men inside them "Il rospo" is our family nickname for the fat man with the eyes of a dead person who emerges after dark in the village thanks to the theft of part of our beautiful beach by highly trained nudists.

May 26, 2026

Philip Patrick

Japan isn’t as safe as you think

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world. What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone.

May 23, 2026

Ian Evans

Welcome to Transnistria: the country that’s not a country

I’ve been on holiday to a country that doesn’t officially exist. It has its own border, passport, flag, currency and army but no one recognizes it – not even its main sponsor, Vladimir Putin. Transnistria is sandwiched between its proper motherland Moldova – which is itself really Romania – and Ukraine, which Putin thinks is part of his motherland. Confused? It doesn’t get any easier. In 1992 there was a short war between the newly created state of Moldova and separatist, ethnic Russians which resulted in nearly 1,000 deaths and the breakaway "country" (via a peace accord) policed by Russian "peacekeepers.

May 21, 2026

Sean Thomas

Is the end of writing finally upon us?

It's that time of year again. The giddy middle of May. When millions across the English-speaking world gather to find out who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. This year's shortlist, drawn – as ever – from a diverse selection of not-European, not-male authors, is particularly enriching and profound. As the committee itself puts it, the stories "bring compelling characters to life in sharply drawn settings, exploring themes of power, family tension, resistance and unheard voices, alongside courage and unexpected connection. Among them are a keenly observant domestic worker, a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer.