FROM THE MAGAZINE

January 2021

Middle East

Biden’s Saudi problem

Can MbS do whatever he wants?

By Paul Wood

From the Magazine

International

Biden, Blinken and the Blob

The challenges facing the incoming president may demand more than a return to normalcy

By Andrew Bacevich

From the Magazine

The Dorothy option

A saint for our times

By Mary Kate Skehan

From the Magazine

International

Duterte Harry

The president of the Philippines makes Donald Trump look like Betty Crocker

By Francis Pike

From the Magazine

Pound rocks

Ezra Pound was a crank who would have been a perfect fit for the internet age

By James Harris

From the Magazine

I’ve been cambridged

I was not ready for lockdown. We are slowly going mad

By Dominic Green

From the Magazine

International

No to policing the world

Biden’s foreign policy is rooted in the mythology of the Cold War

By Matt Purple

From the Magazine

Politics

America’s Yeltsin moment

Trump was the mildest of corrections to the failures of post-Cold War liberalism

By Daniel McCarthy

From the Magazine

The thrill of fear

Human beings love being scared witless

By Mark Mason

From the Magazine

Europe

A honeymoon in Berlin

Younger Berliners seem to want their lives to look as austere as possible

By Lara Prendergast

From the Magazine

Spectator Editorial

Buckle up for Biden and the Blob

Under Biden, expect intoxicated self-righteousness to make a comeback

By Spectator Editorial

From the Magazine

Politics

Are we back in the Obama White House?

Biden, on or past the threshold of senility, is the embodiment of that pajama-boy spirit of fragile futility

By Roger Kimball

From the Magazine

Politics

The family gap

Beneath the mask of American discontent

By Mary Eberstadt

From the Magazine

Internet

End game: the blurring line between fantasy sports and the real thing

Many new-age fans don’t follow teams in the traditional way; they follow the players themselves

By Tim Wigmore

From the Magazine

Love island

Island Dreams: Mapping an Obsession by Gavin Francis reviewed

By Philip Marsden

From the Magazine

Politics

Elvis and Nixon, the odd couple

The day the president met the King

By Christopher Sandford

From the Magazine

Politics

The never-ending smugness of the NeverTrumpers

They knew they were right even when they were wrong

By Douglas Murray

From the Magazine

Politics

Am I a cuck?

I’m falling out with my friend over the election fraud nonsense

By Toby Young

From the Magazine

Books + Arts

Book Review

Epic of gossip

The Lives of Lucian Freud: Fame 1968-2011 by William Feaver reviewed

By Craig Raine

From the Magazine

Music

The king is dead

It’s like rock ’n’ roll never happened

By John Waters

From the Magazine

Books

Kurt Vonnegut: atheist, socialist, trad

Vonnegut did plenty to offend the conservative Christian sensibilities that characterized my educational institutions

By Grayson Quay

From the Magazine

Music

Lullaby in Birdland

Life is still a cabaret

By Madeleine Kearns

From the Magazine

Art

Peake practice

An artist with the soul of a pirate

By Daisy Dunn

From the Magazine

Television

Heroine problem

Female antiheroines — at last

By Katrina Gulliver

From the Magazine

Books

Wish you were there

On the joys of armchair travel

By Hugh Thomson

From the Magazine

Books

The man who hunted himself

Graham Greene needed peace of mind and escapist thrills

By Nicholas Shakespeare

From the Magazine

Television

Hungry like the rabbit

Eighty years ago, Bugs Bunny first launched himself on an unsuspecting Elmer J. Fudd

By James Panero

From the Magazine

Television

Pawn show

The Queen’s Gambit overcomes its hackneyed ‘girl power’ message

By James Delingpole

From the Magazine

Books

Dead letters

The Battle of the Classics: How a Nineteenth-Century Debate Can Save the Humanities Today by Eric Adler reviewed

By William S. Smith

From the Magazine

Life

Woke Life

My advice for Kamala, America’s first trans president

We need to make it easier for parents to transition their children. The sooner the better

By Godfrey Elfwick

From the Magazine

Place

Don’t sweat it

At one time there were 900 bathhouses in Rome alone

By James Panero

From the Magazine

Place

Magic mountain

Like most places in Switzerland, Davos is clean, tidy and full of prosperous, contented people

By William Cook

From the Magazine

Low Life

French tag sales are good for my mental health

It is refreshing and enlivening to be among the poor for a change

By Jeremy Clarke

From the Magazine

Ask Jeeves: who first came out with ‘What ho’?

In 1899, the music-hall song ‘What ho! She bumps!’, with words by Harry Castling, was a hit

By Dot Wordsworth

From the Magazine

A novel ending

A great, even a good, novel has somehow the whole world in it, or even worlds

By Chilton Williamson, Jr.

From the Magazine

Canada the beautiful

By Bill Kauffman

From the Magazine

The perks of a long life

There are children alive today whose offspring might possibly see the 23rd century

By Robert Gray

From the Magazine

Vote with your feet

The warped politics of asking your guests to remove their shoes

By Chadwick Moore

From the Magazine

High Life

Trump supporters never stood a chance

Has anyone on the left heard of ‘magnanimity’?

By Taki

From the Magazine

Food and Drink

Food

Dutch treat

The pride of Pennsylvania

By Mary Kate Skehan

From the Magazine

Food

Hors sense

On the beauty of bite-sized

By Jane Stannus

From the Magazine

Drink

Alpha seltzer: why do Trump bros love White Claw?

The enemies of manhood – liberal male bloggers – have yet to discover what they would call spiked seltzer’s fascism problem

By Chadwick Moore

From the Magazine