Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i The Critic

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● IN 1726, JONATHAN SWIFT PUBLISHED GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, a merciless satire of life in Georgian Britain that, thanks to his monumental genius, became an instant classic of English literature. The English poet and dramatist John Gay observed that it was “universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery”. It might now deserve a place on the reading list of those who aspire to serve in the increasingly probable Reform government of 2029. In particular, they may gain something from revisiting Lilliput, where the gigantic Gulliver is held by a thousand silken threads as a metaphor for the petty constraints that bind Britain fast 299 years on. Those tasked with shaping Reform policy do so in a country whose problems seem daunting for a party lacking an established infrastructure of…

CULTURAL CHANGE IS NEVER ONLY ABOUT winning the argument but about making people desire to side with you. What matters just as much as the Renaissance ideal of eloquent persuasion is attraction: a pull made of je ne sais quoi that wins instincts and dissolves resistance. Call it zeitgeist, moving the Overton Window, or even “vibes”; all are shorthand for deep change in a society’s psyche. The shift is, for instance, evident in attitudes to immigration. Even the New Statesman, hardly a natural ally, put deportations on one of its September covers — something simply unthinkable a few years ago. A similar pattern can be seen in the debate over transgenderism, where in the UK the argument was shifted not so much by politicians but, years ago, by individual victims…

THE HISTORY OF “ENGLISH STUDIES” — defined as the teaching of English Literature in schools, universities and colleges of further education — is usually done in broad brush strokes, and on a canvas so brightly coloured that personality tends to crowd out curricula. And so F.R. Leavis stands in his Downing College lecture room loudly disparaging the belles-lettristes. Over in Birmingham, Professor de Selincourt is busy denouncing T.S. Eliot as a malign influence on the impressionable young. Meanwhile in hidebound Oxford a gang of evil old philologists is hard at work ensuring that “English” doesn’t manifest itself as what one grand Oxonian eminence called, with maximum condescension, “chatter about Shelley”. This, essentially, is the world of such introductions to the subject as Stephen Potter’s The Muse in Chains (1937) and the…

THE SECOND TIME THE BIT-PART PLAYER missed his cue the movie star stormed off set. A while later, after calming down in his trailer, he sashayed back saying he was ready to go again. No need, the director told him, we already shot the scene. Huh? “I’m paid to shoot film,” the director said. “If you walk off, I’ll shoot closeups of your double … I’m not here to jerk off.” Welcome to the world of Clint Eastwood, where nobody, not even Kevin Costner at the peak of his early ’90s pomp, plays prima donna. Certainly Eastwood himself doesn’t. Not long before that tiff, his shadowy, feminist western Unforgiven had taken numerous awards at numerous ceremonies. Any moviemaker would have been overjoyed, but a moviemaker who had spent the previous quarter…

ON THE FACE OF IT, NUNS WOULD hardly seem the most promising territory for opera, what with all that praying and being demure and quietly cleaning stuff up, rather than having massive attention-seeking meltdowns and loads of sex (with rare Black Narcissus-style exceptions, obvs). As with Maria in The Sound of Music, it would seem that music theatre begins where nuns end. And yet they infest European opera from the start, and there’s scarcely a nineteenth-century romantic heroine who isn’t shovelled off to a convent at some point, usually seconds before her libido violently reasserts itself or she kicks the bucket through some unforeseen (albeit predictable) encounter with poison or a dagger. Naturally, the Russians approach things differently: opera’s most alarming sister is Marfa in Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina of 1880, a gothy…

WHAT A TIME TO BE A MIDDLE-AGED man! The year began with a film about Bob Dylan going electric, and ends with one about Bruce Springsteen going acoustic. All we need now is for Netflix to pull its finger out and commission a 50-episode series of Master and Commander. Deliver Me from Nowhere covers the weeks in New Jersey when Springsteen, in the early stages of his superstar status, locked himself away to write what would ultimately be the dark, brooding Nebraska. The album, a set of songs about desolation and murder recorded in his bedroom, was not, it’s fair to say, what his record company was hoping for. Jeremy Allen White, familiar from his role as troubled chef Carmy in TV’s Th e Bear, gives us a Springsteen in…

KEIR STARMER WON A GIGANTIC electoral victory a mere ten months ago, and the right is already ascendant. Instead of the Conservatives taking the fight to Labour, though, it is Reform who are topping the opinion polls. How can we make sense of this strange political moment? It is time to explore the world of right-wing podcasts. Thankfully, a new podcast from the Spectator promises “sanity and common sense in a world that seems increasingly devoid of both” — presented by Michael Gove. Quite Right has been launched by Gove and Madeline Grant — Spectator assistant editor and parliamentary sketchwriter. Ms Grant is witty and likeable — a fine podcast host. Mr Gove, alas, is Mr Gove. In the first episode, the veteran Conservative minister and current Spectator editor makes…

FOR TWO YEARS NOW, A CHORUS of art-world doomsayers has been insisting that the trade is heading Thelma and Louise-style over a cliff. The gallery system no longer works, Britain’s billionaires are fleeing for softer tax regimes, Asian collectors have vanished into the mist, and even Sotheby’s is struggling. Mediocre auction results only fuel the despair. Some of that may even be true. What is also true is that the upper reaches of the market — works above $5 million — are quieter than they have been for a decade. But does weakness at the top trickle down to the rest? Hardly. The “art market” is not a single thing, but a patchwork of sub-markets that occasionally overlap. The buyer of a Chinese imperial bowl does not necessarily also consider…

A couple of weeks back, I overheard a pretty well known TV chef and occasional hunter say that he’s never really understood hanging a deer head on the wall. To him, he went on, it’s all about harvesting fine meat from beautiful places. To some extent, I get where he’s coming from. There are few greater pleasures than serving up some exceptional roebuck steaks from an animal that was shot less than a mile away from wherever it is you’re eating it or packaging up a whole muntjac (as I’ve been doing a bit lately) to send to somebody in London who wants to eat meat more sustainably. I, too, understand the antipathy towards the notion of “the trophy hunter”. There’s nothing pretty about bloated, sunburned plutocrats grinning over the…

It’s why teenagers and young adults think slapping, spitting, choking and anal sex are mainstream sexual activities AROUND 11 PER CENT OF BRITISH PEOPLE HAVE sex at least once a week. But 14 per cent of men (and 1 per cent of women) watch porn at least twice or three times a week. Each day, there are more visits to porn sites than to Amazon, Linked-In, Netflix, Zoom and eBay combined. These are just a few of the eye-opening facts in Jo Bartosch’s and Rob Jessel’s fine new book, Pornocracy, which charts the rise of a new world order in which online porn shapes the offline world, from trends in street style and cosmetic surgery to relations between the sexes inside and outside the bedroom. Its ubiquity, they argue, is changing…

Four divided by two ALL CHANGE IN THE DITUM HOUSEHOLD. JUST A few weeks after my son moved out, launching himself fully onto the world after a post-graduation hiatus, we were dropping my daughter off at university. This is momentous for all of us: I felt emotional when I was delivering my son to his halls four years ago, but this time I know it’s the beginning of the end to this chapter of parenting. From now on, the majority of my parenting will be done remotely, and the job of “mum” will take up considerably less of my time. After nearly 25 years (and more than half my life), I can do what I like. It’s an eerie feeling in some ways: the death of the primary identity of…

FOR MANY ON THE LEFT, IT WAS BREXIT: LEAVing the European Union deprived the Conservatives of their real core supporters — the prosperous, established, working middle classes who do well out of life. After all, what’s conservatism for if not conserving the status quo? For most on the right, by contrast, it was immigration: the collapse of our borders and their replacement by chaos — the origins of which, they say, lay in David Cameron’s modernisation project, also evident in the Tory approach to Net Zero, equalities and growth. Neither of these explanations about why the Conservatives failed are true. Or, at least, neither are the whole truth nor nothing but the truth. The core reason lies elsewhere. To find it, consider the proportion of the vote the Tories have…

“INGRATITUDE TOWARDS their great men,” says Plutarch, “is the mark of strong peoples.” This was quoted by Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm when talking about the French discarding Georges Clemenceau after the Great War. But he followed almost immediately with the caution “It was imprudent of France to indulge this trait when she was so grievously weakened.” Well, the old warhorse’s words have risen from the literary grave to be true of him too. Just as Britain is grievously weakened, we have turned on our great men — not least the man voted the BBC’s “Greatest Briton” just after the Millennium. WHILE READERS OF THIS MAGAZINE are no doubt well versed in the ways in which the political left have tarnished Churchill’s reputation over many years, it may come…

THERE IS AN EMPTY RESTAURANT IN CENTRAL Oxford gathering dust. Through the windows one can see the bar still decorated with green tiles arranged in a geometric pattern which was fashionable — and dare I say cutting-edge for Oxford — in the early 2010s. It has been shut for a few years, likely another victim of the pandemic and its after-effects which have wreaked destruction on Britain’s restaurants. Crowds of students and tourists bustle around outside, looking through the lodge of Exeter College and gazing at the curves of the nearby Radcliffe Camera, but this particular premises has always struggled. My godmother — a native of Oxford and Witney — told me soon after it opened that it wouldn’t last long. She had seen so many ventures come and go,…

‘‘THE PAST,” OBSERVED L.P. HARTLEY, “is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” Never was a truer word written. We did things differently. Our streets were uncluttered save for red telephone boxes and parking meters, our BBC was universally respected and believed, and our policemen appeared ared kindly and approachable, unlike today’s Daesh-dressed robocops. That is not to say that our forebears got everything right, or that all in their garden was rosy-tinted half a century ago. Stop/Go economics; industrial complacency; workplace strife, all beneath the penumbra of our withdrawal as a world power, combined to cast a pall over life beyond the bubble ble of swinging London. For every engaging and gregarious Georgy Girl, there was many a Poor Cow. To escape the drudgery of late-1950s kitchen sink…

A DESCRIPTIVE VOYAGE THROUGH the whole of classical music, on which Robin Holloway ventures in his new book, Music’s Odyssey, takes in the most sublime, complex and multi-faceted abstract achievement of Western culture — of any culture. It emerged from religious chant and folksong, after centuries of gestation, at the point when unison finally gave way to polyphony. It then took wing in the Renaissance, where the displacement of God by man as the proper study of mankind was mirrored by the establishment of a tonic or home key which music could leave and return to. This was a critical development; for the first time, individual pieces of music became memorable. The conventions of modern harmony were born, bringing with them the possibility of new depths of expression, exploited in the…

THE OPENING CHAPTER OF SALLY GIMson’s new book, Off The Rails: The Inside Story of HS2, gives an account of what could have been: the first new railway built north of London since 1900, a rare exercise in long-termist “Cathedral thinking”, a country united and enriched by a gleaming high-speed railway line. Does that not sound dreamy? Well dream on, because in 2023 then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that High Speed 2 (HS2), initially planned to run from Manchester to London Euston via Birmingham and the wider Midlands, would be scaled down. With everything north of Birmingham excised, the line will terminate at Old Oak Common, where a station is being built about an hour from central London. Sunak’s announcement was a disaster, with costly implications. In place of…

MIDWAY THROUGH THE DIVINE Comedy’s show at the Forum, Bath, a roadie rolled a drinks trolley on stage and Neil Hannon (who, as the founder, sole continuous member and singular creative force, really is the Divine Comedy) introduced his band by mixing them a round of drinks. It was a delicious moment: silly, charming and incongruous, and therefore perfectly Hannon. The musical bed to all this was “Mar a Lago by the Sea” from Rainy Sunday Afternoon, which is the Divine Comedy’s thirteenth album. It’s a breezily wistful piece of easy listening, with lyrics that bite. Taking the character of a future Donald Trump, Hannon reminisces about the glory days in a corrupt paradise: “Cheating losers on the greens/Swapping wives for beauty queens/Making turgid wedding speeches/Entertaining fascist leeches.” Then, two…

EVERY WRITER DREAMS OF AN ongoing series. The return of beloved characters and inspired protagonists brings the chance to test them anew. But repeated revisits also bring their own challenges. How much backstory does the reader or viewer need to understand what is happening? And how much is too much for the veteran fan who needs no context or explanation? Beyond these creative conundrums there is a greater hazard — that over-familiarity breeds boredom. Season five of Slow Horses, now showing on Apple TV+, gets off to a predictable start. Not in terms of action. It starts with a murderous terrorist attack in London. A shooter opens fire on numerous passers-by before a sniper blows his head off. The sniper is not a police officer but another bad guy. But…

THE ETHIOPIAN PAINTER TESFAYE Urgessa’s canvases assemble casts of larger-than-life characters in poses straight out of the art history textbook. In some images — rendered in abstract strokes and soft palettes — the artist’s subjects are still, as though enacting a religious allegory. In others, they adopt stilted walk-like-an-Egyptian stances familiar from pre-Renaissance court painting. They are often partly unclothed and recognisable only by their disembodied limbs, although that does not take away from their plain dignity. Urgessa sets them at the dinner table, mid journey, or amidst a frenzied orgy, where they are, nonetheless, deep in dialogue with others out of the frame. Their interlocutors are sometimes found in the very next picture, sometimes in an altogether different museum. If this sounds Delphic, that’s because it is. Urgessa’s conversation…

I FIND COCKS’ HEADS UNREWARDing, though in Ávila, at the hour of the apéritif, men suck and crunch them whole — beaks, eyes, coxcombs — and spit out the bones with no pretence at decorum. Extremities of edible quadrupeds — ears, cheeks, ox tongues and tails, cow heels, trotters — are much more tempting and typically delicious, without offending sticklers for etiquette. They have the allure of diminishing accessibility: hard to sell in the Anglophone world and, therefore, hard to buy. Even in lands where denizens appreciate offal, some arcane organs are becoming almost unobtainable. On an afternoon of slanting sun a few years ago, at a rickety table under the blank bulk of the cathedral of Palencia, the waiter proudly told me that criadillas were available. “These are really…

A city beautiful, adamant and grey. So spoke Sir Laurence Olivier narrating the documentary A Queen is Crowned. Olivier was referring to Edinburgh, but the appellation might be equally ascribed to its northern neighbour, Aberdeen. Certainly the imposing facades of Union Street, sweeping along with sober uniformity, appear to be carved of granite and cast in nickel. Granted status as a royal burgh by King David I, the city acquired a university in 1495. Having for centuries been a place of learning, the discovery of black gold in 1969 displaced the traditional industries of textiles and fishing and transformed Aberdeen into a seat of earning as Europe’s offshore exploration capital as wealth, and wealth seekers, flowed in with the oil. My old friend Alistair Snowie invited me up to Aberdeen to…

WHO’S THE GREATEST CYCLIST OF all time? For the past 50 years, the answer’s been simple: EDDY MERCKX first, daylight second. But finally there’s another name in the caprine conversation: Slovenia’s TADEJ POGAČAR. A rider’s place in history depends primarily on the nine most prestigious annual races: the three-week Grand Tours (Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta a España); the five one-day Monuments (Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Ronde van Vlaanderen, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Il Lombardia); and the World Road Race Championship. At first glance, bracketing Merckx and Pogačar together looks absurd. Merckx has 11 Grand Tours to Pogačar’s five, 19 Monuments to 10, and three Worlds to two. Merckx won every Grand Tour at least once and every Monument at least twice: Pogačar has yet to conquer the Vuelta, Milan-San Remo or Paris-Roubaix.…

ROBERT CONQUEST’S THIRD law of politics is that the behaviour of bureaucratic organisations is best understood by assuming they are controlled by a secret cabal of their enemies. This could explain why the likes of the World Health Organisation seem so intent on propping up the cigarette trade. Indeed, it is quite possible there would be fewer smokers today if the anti-smoking movement had never existed. Consider the history. The smoking rate in Britain more than halved between 1950 and 1990 without any heavy-handed measures. By the mid-1960s the evidence that smoking caused cancer was so compelling that health warnings were put on cigarettes and a campaign of mass education was underway. By the 1980s, all but the most recalcitrant contrarian accepted that smoking was bad for their health. That…

IN SEPTEMBER, THE NHS “GENOMICS EDUCATION Programme” published an article asking whether the UK government should ban first-cousin marriage. Its answer was a confident no, even suggesting such unions might bring social benefits. The public outcry was immediate. So much so that the article vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. Yet this is hardly the first time Britain has wrestled with the question. First-cousin marriage was formally sanctioned by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. More than three centuries later, Charles Darwin himself worried about its consequences. Married to his cousin Emma Wedgwood, Darwin fathered ten children, several of whom died young, suffered chronic illness, or remained childless. His fears about inbreeding were not abstract: they were written into the pulse irregularities, digestive disorders, and premature deaths of his own…

NO NEWSPAPER COLUMNIST GAVE greater joy to readers in the years 1957–2006 than Michael Wharton. He was a Tory anarchist who detested progress, hated communism, had no love of America or of capitalism, dreamed in a self-mocking way of an ideal feudal past, spoke up for unfashionable minorities, including the Afrikaners, the Serbs and the Ulster Unionists, and had a Dickensian gift for inventing characters who epitomised the absurdities of modern life. His “Way of the World” column in the Daily Telegraph, which he wrote under the name Peter Simple, was home to Dr Heinz Kiosk, chief psychiatric adviser to the White Fish Authority and many other bodies, whose impending cry, “We are all guilty”, would send people rushing too late for the exit. Also to be found in the…

SITTING IN HIS CRAMPED OFFICE, amidst slanting autumn sun, and flanked by a distant view of Pennine hills, Sebastian is busy writing copy for the Bruddersford Arts Centre spring catalogue. The double-page spreads allocated to celebrity visitors — Rachel Cusk, Ali Smith et al — have been and gone. Now Seb is hard at work on the seminar and workshop sessions ssions that crowd out the catalogue’s second half. “Why not join our Bruddersford ‘Narratives from history’ day?” he begins. “Your challenge will be to write a story inspired by a local artefact or a personality from Bruddersford’s rich, multicultural heritage. Expert tutors will be on hand to advise and encourage.” Then, mindful of the rubric that features on the catalogue’s cover — “A progressive arts hub for citizens of…

A BOOK CALLED TWELVE CHURCHES suggests a richly illustrated coffee-table tome. Indeed, only the most charismatic of authors could possibly pull off the challenge of discussing buildings in text alone. Yet Fergus Butler-Gallie, the young Church of England vicar, writer and broadcaster, is just such a man. His radiant personality, and keen passion for his subject matter, are manifest on every page of Twelve Churches. This is very much a Christian book, peppered with references across the many corners of Christian literature: there are leaps from Clement of Alexandria to Eusebius of Caesarea, from Matthew’s Gospel to Professor Linda Woodhead (an expert in Christian demography), from Martin Luther King Jr to G.K. Chesterton. Butler-Gallie combines genuine curiosity about his subject matter, as both an expositor and a student of church history and…

‘‘KAMALA IS FOR THEY/THEM, President Trump is for you.” Thus went the kicker of what many believe was the most consequential ad in the 2024 American presidential campaign. Meanwhile, in the UK, the North Hertfordshire Museum has decided to use the pronouns “she/her” when referring to the early-third-century Roman emperor Elagabalus, during whose reign a coin was minted that the museum owns. One may wonder what Dame Mary Beard thinks of this. As she wrote in the Spectator World late last year, “Elagabalus” is her usual response to the common question “Which emperor is Donald Trump most like?” In a world that is grappling, often painfully, with issues of gender and identity, it is not surprising that America’s most prominent public linguist, John McWhorter, decided the time was right for…

WHEN IS A SHORT STORY NOT A short story? Earlier this year, we reviewed Colwill Brown’s excellent debut novel We Pretty Pieces of Flesh. Last month, one chapter of Brown’s novel won the BBC National Short Story Award, as a stand-alone work of fiction. The borders are permeable. Which makes it a good time to use this month’s fiction column to look at a sample of this season’s short story collections. Welsh writer Cynan Jones is known for two things: writing about men and the natural world; and cutting his stories to the bone. Cove, one of the greatest short novels I’ve read, was about a man stranded on a boat. His previous novel The Dig was about lambing and badger-baiting. Pulse follows this pattern: its six stories feature a…

SOMETIME IN THE 1870S, MUSIC learned that its evolution had not been organic. Rather than rising in small incremental notches like a graph on a business account, it looked more like the Himalayas — a range of half-glimpsed peaks with fertile plateaus in between. The summits were known as Great Composers, and this was the origin of the species. GC theory was an offshoot of Thomas Carlyle’s idea that world history “is at bottom the History of the Great Men”. Where Carlyle listed Muhammad, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Napoleon as world changers, musicians in the 1870s recognised that Italian opera, without Verdi, would be trivial and without Wagner there would be no German opera at all. Great Composers tear up and redraw the map of music, Q.E.Die Meistersinger. In the past,…

TO KICK OFF THE AUTUMN, TWO artistic directors are launching their first seasons at the South Bank: Indhu Rubasingham at the National Theatre and Nadia Fall at the Young Vic. It is bizarrely fitting that two of their opening productions both have Oedipal overtones, with Fall’s staging of Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane coming just before NT Deputy Artistic Director Robert Hastie’s new Hamlet. The one is supposed to be funny, and largely isn’t; the other is a tragedy played for laughs. Neither is wholly successful, although both have some interest. Orton has proved increasingly unpopular to stage over recent years, with murmurs that his activities with underage boys in Tangiers have turned him from a respected, if edgy, Sixties playwright into a thoroughly cancellable paedophile. Both, of course, may…

IN OUR TIME IS A JEWEL, ADMIRED by all. The wide-ranging discussion on Radio 4 fulfils all three parts of the BBC’s founding purpose: it informs, entertains, and educates. Each week two million listeners tune in and say, “I learned something interesting today.” It will carry on, every Thursday at 9am, but shorn of the host. Melvyn Bragg has declared his innings closed after 27 years, and 1,038 programmes. In all he has spent 64 years as a broadcaster. Now, at 86, he’s losing his voice. Yes, 64 years! The Beatles were still dodging bottles in Hamburg, and the first James Bond film was 12 months away, when the young pup, fresh from Oxford, joined the BBC as a trainee. So he’s seen it all. Brought up above a pub…

BEFORE THIS SUMMER, I hadn’t been to Poundbury apart from a fleeting visit in the mid-1990s. Back then, it was not much more than a new housing estate in open countryside halfway between Dorchester and Maiden Castle. So, I was totally ill-prepared for the shock of arriving recently to find my way through a small- to medium-sized country town on the scale of Broadway or Moreton-in-the-Marsh, except ultra-quiet, all of it built in the last 30 years, and without any tourists. It has a policy of no sign-posting. Most of the criticism of Poundbury, and there is a huge amount of incredibly rude commentary (Stephen Bayley describes it as “fake, heartless, authoritarian and grimly cute”), comes from people who only saw Phase 1 of the project when it was all…

BEM JÓZSEF STREET IN THE town of Tokaj was once the Hungarian equivalent of the Avenue de Champagne in Épernay. Merchants from all over Europe came to buy the most revered sweet wine in the world. The Tsar would send a detachment of soldiers to make sure his precious Tokaji made it safely back to St Petersburg. It’s a bit more low-key now, though still home to some cellars such as Erzsébet Pince. The winemaker Erzsébet (the Hungarian for Elizabeth) Pracser reminisced about the street’s glorious past and finished with “I hope that era happens again soon”. As well as Russia and the Austro-Hungarian empire, the wines were particularly popular in Poland. Indeed, the street is named after a Pole: Bem József was a sort of East European Garibaldi who…

CRITIC READERS ON THE CUSP of commissioning a new lake for their country home should press on, notwithstanding the recent contretemps involving Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman at his Conholt Park estate. His workers’ enthusiastic deployment of water tankers to accelerate the filling of his new lake was stopped, yet his intention stands in a laudable English landscape tradition in need of revival. Indeed, in the times of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton it was almost embarrassing not to have one’s own serpentine lake. Imagine Petworth, Stourhead, West Wycombe, or Woburn Abbey without water. Capability Brown was famous for his fees, and planning for projects such as Conholt Park still requires both patience and huge investment — in design, engineering, archaeology and ecology reports, long term management plans and BNG calculations…