Journalism
A sadder and a wiser man
‘Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults.’ A.N. Wilson seems, on the surface, to have taken to heart…
There’s no such thing as an ‘ordinary Russian’
There was a whiteboard in the BBC Baghdad bureau for noting down phrases we hoped to ban from the airwaves.…
The price of courage
Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…
Have we got news for you
In The Spectator office’s toilets there are framed front covers of the events that didn’t happen: Corbyn beats Boris; ‘Here’s…
High life
Two weeks ago in St Moritz I ran into both Nicolas Niarchos and Nikolai von Bismarck, two talented young men…
Mexico is no country for journalists
I’m writing this on my last day in Mexico City, having accompanied my 18-year-old daughter here for the first week…
Corporation facts
The BBC must ask itself if Nadine Dorries has a point
Good old bad old days
After a career spanning 50 years, 40 books and about a million parties, Anthony Holden has written a memoir. Based…
The stories that are too good to check
Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news…
High life
I write this as a follow-up to last week’s essay on muzzling after making whoopee. I’m on my way to…
Kompromatt
How I missed the Hancock story
Sense and sensitivity
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a…
Total eclipse
Where did it all go wrong for the Sun?
Six of the best
Two war correspondents were hitching a lift towards Paris in August 1944 when a sudden wave of German bombers forced…
Dramatically wrong
‘Rouse tempers, goad and lacerate, raise whirlwinds.’ Those were the words that Kenneth Tynan, the most celebrated drama critic of…
One who got away
Hella Pick is one of that vanishing generation of Jewish refugees who arrived in Britain on the eve of the…
Press gang
The dangers of televising lobby briefings
More magical thinking
Most collections of journalism are bad. There are two reasons for this: one is that they are usually incoherent and…
Watch: Boris on the problem with journalists
What’s the phrase? Poacher turned gamekeeper? Boris Johnson was once the arch poacher — a journalist at the Telegraph before taking on the editorship…
Desperate Times
The US press has lost its way
Soft-centred satire
There was an acidic bravura and beauty in P.J. O’Rourke’s early journalism and a gleefulness in the ease with which…
Ghosts of Christmas pissed
I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will…
The outsiders
Tanya Gold on the journalists who scripted the golden age of Hollywood
Never a dull sentence
Is Boris Johnson a fan of Harry Perry Robinson? If he isn’t, he really ought to be. Reading this absorbing…
The BBC’s failure to report gender identity accurately
‘Blackpool woman accessed child abuse images in hospital bed’. It’s a good headline, in that it catches your attention. But…
