Christopher Howse | The Spectator columnists & writers

Turn down an alley off St James’s Street (the east side), lined with old painted panelling, and you are in Pickering Place, which pub quizzers say is London’s smallest public square. It is certainly charming, with stone paving, wrought iron railings, Georgian windows and a sundial on a pedestal. A gaslight on a wall bracket used to glow sympathetically in the space. Now Westminster Council has replaced it with an LED. It had threatened to do the same for all its 299 gaslights still under council control, but a rearguard action has halted its plans. The beauty of gaslights may depend on your starting point. They were, at a crucial moment of his life, anathema to John Ruskin. As though the railway to Venice wasn’t bad enough, he was shocked in 1845 to find by the Grand Canal, ‘gas lamps! – on each side in brand new iron posts of the last Birmingham fashion’.

Spectator Out Loud

Mary Wakefield, James Ball and Christopher Howse

22 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Mary Wakefield, James Ball and Christopher Howse

22 min listen

This week on Spectator Out Loud: Mary Wakefield tells us about her frustrating experience trying to give blood (00:49), James Ball says that it may be the beginning of the end for Mark Zuckerberg (07:04), and Christopher Howse reads his Notes on... signatures (16:44).Produced and presented by Oscar Edmondson.

What your signature says about you

I have a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II and her parents on the wall of my bathroom, not out of any lack of respect but because the gloom there prevents it fading. It is signed Albert, with an odd droop forward of the bar of the T to join a single flourish beneath, and Elizabeth in a familiar hand. This is not the late Queen’s signature, though, for it was made in 1927, when Princess Elizabeth was hardly into talking, let alone signing. Queen Elizabeth, whom we still think of as the Queen Mother, was a simple royal duchess then. Yet one can’t help thinking that in choosing her style of italic signature she had taken note of that of her namesake: the first Queen Elizabeth. Another Elizabeth, Liz Truss, got some stick for the signature on the letter to Kwasi Kwarteng about his sacking.

What I’ve learnt from editing a newspaper letters page

Letters to a daily newspaper have a curious power to gain an impetus of their own. ‘I owned a Triumph Herald many decades ago,’ wrote Robert Brown of Crosby to the Telegraph in January. ‘She was my first love. On cold winter nights I would keep her warm with an old mackintosh thrown over her engine under the bonnet. Perhaps it was this that protected her from a thief one night. She was driven off our drive on to the road but steadfastly refused to go any further.’ It soon became clear that we’d hit a seam of experience in recent history, when lives and loves were expressed through small British cars of doubtful reliability. ‘While I was driving my Herald in the 1970s,’ wrote Karen Mullan of Hove, ‘the passenger door flew open on a bend, and my handbag and dog fell out.

Should have been even longer with less gore: The Northman reviewed

In Rus, which we now call Ukraine, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard) begins his pursuit of revenge. A sea captain who later aids him is called Volodymyr. But these incidentals have no relevance to the current war, except in one aspect that I want to come on to. Though the film’s hero is called Amleth, the original of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet, you can forget Elsinore. The director Robert Eggers’s world in The Northman is that of the Norse sagas, of corpse-eating ravens, runes, mud, gore, human sacrifice and sudden violence. One of the runes on the title cards between scenes is named after the word for ‘ulcer’. The sun never shines. It is surprising that, in their wet homespuns, everyone isn’t shivering. Occasionally we glimpse spectacular, soggy Icelandic scenery, but two hours are principally cheered by a succession of slittings, maimings and disembowellings that often made me hide behind my notebook.

Spectator Out Loud

Christopher Howse, Richard Florida and Olivia Potts

28 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Christopher Howse, Richard Florida and Olivia Potts

28 min listen

On this week's episode, we'll hear from Christopher Howse on the destruction of Ukrainian churches. (00:50)Next, Richard Florida on how Covid has changed London for the better. (13:52)And finally, Olivia Potts on her love of the crisp sandwich. (23:56)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator today and get a £20 Amazon gift voucher.

Why the destruction of Ukraine’s churches matters

One small, deadly incident in the Ukrainian war proved memorable because it involved the ordinary things of life. A mother and two children trying to leave the town of Irpin on foot on 6 March died from Russian shelling. Their suitcases fell beside them and, miserably, a pet dog carrier. They lay on an ordinary road that could be in Surrey, on the steps of a memorial to Soviet dead from the second world war. That spot is opposite a little row of bells under a tiled roof in the grounds of the Ukrainian Orthodox church of St George. A neat hoarding was visible in 2015 on the building next to the modest unfinished church, showing what it would look like when the five domes were roofed and gilded. Footage of the explosion that killed the family shows the completed domes gleaming in the sunshine, the building behind the hoarding still intact and the conifers in its garden not yet turned into spent matches.

Stupendous: The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum reviewed

This exhibition is Hamlet without the Prince, and all the better for it. Stonehenge is not there; it remains in Wiltshire. But 430 astonishing artefacts from the neolithic and bronze ages fill a hairpin course like a Roman chariot-racing circuit in a vast room. It is blessedly free from videos of prehistoric Britons tugging on ropes to move monoliths. There is a henge on display, though. (The word in its technical sense was invented in 1932 by Sir Thomas Kendrick, later director of the British Museum.) This is the Seahenge that emerged on the shore at Holme-next-the-Sea in 1998: 55 big oak posts round a two-ton upturned rooted trunk. Gloriously, being trees, they can be dated to a year: 2049 BC. It was sad that it had to be dug up, but here it is, anatomised in a museum.

Spectator Out Loud

Lara Prendergast, Christopher Howse, Lionel Shriver, Peter Hitchens, Joanna Lumley and Caroline Moore

55 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Lara Prendergast, Christopher Howse, Lionel Shriver, Peter Hitchens, Joanna Lumley and Caroline Moore

55 min listen

On this week's very special Christmas episode, Lara Prendergast on why she’s planning to party hard this Christmas. (00:57)Next, Christopher Howse on those helping to preserve the UK’s medieval churches. (06:31)Then it's, Lionel Shriver on the Covid heretics she admires most. (16:41)Followed by, Peter Hitchens on Christmas in Russia during the last days of the Soviet Union. (25:23)Penultimately, we have Joanna Lumley on getting the key to the Sistine Chapel. (35:69)And finally, Caroline Moore on how ghost stories became a British Christmas tradition.(41:51)Produced and presented by Sam HolmesSubscribe to The Spectator magazine this Christmas and get the next 12 issues – in print and online – for just £12. Not only that but you’ll also receive a bottle of Taittinger champagne, worth £42, to see you through to the new year.

2021 Christmas quiz

Rather odd In 2021: On which planet did Nasa fly a small helicopter called Ingenuity, bearing a fragment of the Wright brothers’ first aeroplane?A pair of trainers worn by which US basketball star during his first season with the Chicago Bulls in 1984 went for $1.47 million at auction?Which bridge got stuck with its bascules up after opening to let a sailing ship through?Twelve women became drivers on which capital city’s metro after a ban imposed in the 1980s was lifted?What killed 16 people taking selfies on top of a watch-tower in Jaipur? Who had painted a picture sold by Angelina Jolie for £7 million at auction in London?In which country must sparkling wine sold as champagne, Shampanskoye, be produced, according to a law brought into force by President Vladimir Putin? Which department store in Princes Street, Edinburgh, founded in 1838, was vacated this year?In which country was a cluster of star sapphires, weighing more than half a ton and valued at $100 million, found when a well was being dug in a backyard?In September, which country became the first to make bitcoin legal tender? Don’t quote me In 2021, who said: 1.

The tiny charity that saves derelict churches from destruction

The Edition

Deaths of despair: how Britain became Europe’s drugs capital

37 min listen

The Edition

Deaths of despair: how Britain became Europe’s drugs capital

37 min listen

In this week’s episode: Is there any substance to the government’s new drugs agenda?In The Spectator this week Fraser Nelson writes the cover story on the government’s new 10 years drugs plan and finds that while on the surface this seems like a new war on drugs, it might actually have some thoughtful and effective policies buried within it. Fraser is joined on the podcast by Christopher Snowden, the head of lifestyle economics at the Institute of Economic Affairs. (00:52)Also this week: Can Islam save Britain’s churches?Britain has for a long time now has been becoming a more and more secular nation. This has meant that many churches that used to have full pews are at risk of turning into luxury flats or another Tesco Express.

The deafening rise of ‘background’ music

One of my favourite things on British Muslim TV is Ask the Alim. An alim is a learned expert in the law. He’ll answer anything, live. The 2020 Best Bits highlights programme included a question about divorce. Can a man take back a woman he has divorced? Good question. It depends whether the divorce is revocable or irrevocable, according to the alim. Boris Johnson has been doing something similar on Facebook recently: Ask the Prime Minister. Instead of expertise on Shariah, he offers an ‘irreversible roadmap to freedom’. But there has been something a bit weird recently about the broadcasts (easily viewed and reviewed to your heart’s content on Twitter, too). It’s the music. The alim certainly does not speak accompanied by music.

Devil of a job: the curious occupations recorded in the census

Even before the first census was made in 1801, the plan was regarded with fear, hatred and ridicule. And this year, on 21 March, households have another chance to mock, embrace or ignore the census. When parliament debated a bill in 1753 for an annual census, Matthew Ridley, MP for Newcastle, warned that his constituents ‘looked on the proposal as ominous, and feared lest some public misfortune or an epidemical distemper should follow’. They were aware that, by the Bible’s account, ‘Satan rose up against Israel and caused David to take a census of the people of Israel’. God was so angry that he gave the King three choices: seven years of famine, three months of fleeing his enemies or three days of pestilence. He chose the last and 70,000 died.

God’s many mansions: a guide to the world’s greatest churches

The surroundings of the Crimea Memorial Church in Istanbul are ‘little better than a dump’, wrote the British embassy chaplain in 1964. ‘It takes an intimate knowledge of the place to find it.’ Today, the street running north-west from the Galata tower on the far side of the Golden Horn is quite chic. Turn right at the end and, above fig trees and trumpets of bougainvillea, you glimpse the lead-roofed spirelet of the church. It is by G.E. Street, the architect of St James the Less in Vauxhall Bridge Road, which also has stripes across nave walls and chancel vaulting. The competition to design the church in Istanbul demanded that the style should be ‘the recognised Ecclesiastical Architecture of Western Europe, known as Pointed or Gothic’, duly adapted for a hot climate.

2020 Christmas quiz

Out of the ordinary In 2020:1. The town of Asbestos voted to change its name to Val-des-Sources. In which country does it lie?2. What town between Dunstable and Milton Keynes was hit by four earthquakes in a fortnight?3. In a heatwave in America where was a temperature of 130˚F recorded? 4. In April a volcano erupted on an island in the caldera of its predecessor, which exploded in 1883 and went by what name?5. Which Mediterranean island nation gave each of its citizens €100 to spend in bars?6. Chad began to send 75,000 cattle as repayment of a debt of $100 million to which other African country? 7. In February, who won the New Hampshire Democratic primary?8. Which former CEO of Nissan started the year in Lebanon, having been smuggled out of Japan for a flight to Istanbul hidden in a container for audio equipment? 9.

Who decides what’s allowed on a gravestone?

A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is no general prohibition on the inclusion in inscriptions on headstones of words or phrases in a language other than English,’ said Mark Hill QC, Chancellor of the Diocese of Leeds, sitting in a consistory court. If that is so, why was a family of Irish background forbidden by a consistory court in June from putting an Irish inscription on the gravestone in a Nuneaton churchyard of Margaret Keane, who had died aged 73? The inscription would have said: ‘In ár gcroíthe go deo.' Perhaps not many people in Nuneaton would have known it meant ‘In our hearts for ever’. In that case, the judge in the ecclesiastical court ruled: ‘There is a sad risk that the phrase would be regarded as some form of slogan, or that its inclusion without translation would, of itself, be seen as a political statement.

The art of street furniture

It was possible to stand in the middle of the road during the lockdown without being run over. In Willow Place, near Victoria Station, I crouched over a narrow grating of stout grey iron, and caught a glimpse of light reflected from moving water deep below, as though at the bottom of a well. This was the River Tyburn, on its way from Hampstead via Buckingham Palace to the Thames. During the endlessly sunny lockdown days, I wandered the streets near my office in Victoria. The bright unpeopled silence (like a landscape by de Chirico) brought to my attention details unnoticed before. With all the galleries closed, this was street art. Hidden rivers are romantic, and commuters are often astonished to learn that the fat green-painted iron pipe above their heads, crossing the tracks of the District Line, is the River Westbourne.

Why beards of convenience are a bad idea

Viewers of the BBC News channel, now that Zoom shows talking heads in their own homes, want before anything to have a good look at the sitting rooms or study shelves of daily newspaper reviewers. But often this important task is distracted by disturbing face-foliage grown during lockdown. Jack Blanchard from Politico presents a face mottled with brown and grey like lichen on an old wall, and the curvaceous chin of James Rampton from the Independent bursts out with stubble like a ginger Desperate Dan. This is like queuing for the supermarket in your pyjamas, so different from the profitably energetic habits of Samuel Pepys, who told his diary: ‘Up betimes, and shaved myself after a week’s growth. But, Lord! how ugly I was yesterday and how fine to-day!’ He had an excuse, for he’d spent the time, in gaps between work, putting his house to rights after the Great Fire of London.

Gay giraffes and dead in ditches: The Spectator 2019 quiz | 25 December 2019

They said it In 2019, who said: 1. ‘You have stolen my dreams and my childhood.’ 2. ‘I didn’t sweat at the time because I had suffered what I would describe as an overdose of adrenaline in the Falklands War when I was shot at.’ 3. ‘Ninety per cent of giraffes are gay.’ 4. ‘I have been wondering what the special place in hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.’ 5. ‘No clapping.’ 6. ‘I’d rather be dead in a ditch.’ 7. ‘Anyone who attempts to split any region from China will perish, with their bodies smashed and bones ground to powder.’ 8. ‘I for one prefer the tried-and-tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view.

Away from the manger: the holy relics of Bethlehem

‘No crib for a bed,’ says ‘Away in a Manger’ rather puzzlingly, since a crib is a manger. ‘No one paid me much attention, lying on the hard stones, a young child in a crib,’ says God made Man in the Old English poem ‘Christ’. At the beginning of his prophecy, Isaiah declares: ‘The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master’s crib.’ The crib as a manger lent its name to the whole Christmas caboodle of stable, ox, ass, Mary, Joseph and all the trimmings of magi and shepherds. Francis of Assisi was keen on building cribs that put the Christ Child in his surroundings, and the idea caught on. But the anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet was probably right about the Christ Child feeling hard stone, since the manger for feeding animals was no doubt in some limestone cave at Bethlehem.

Gay giraffes and dead in ditches: The Spectator 2019 quiz

The Spectator Christmas quiz

You don’t say In 2018, who said: 1. ‘I have the absolute power to PARDON myself, but why should I do that when I have done nothing wrong?’ 2. ‘A piece of cake, perhaps? Sorry, no cherries.’ 3. ‘Frankly, Russia should go away and should shut up.’ 4. ‘It is absolutely ridiculous that people should choose to go around looking like letter boxes.’ 5. ‘I always say that the river flows well to its destiny because of the guidance of a solid rock.’ 6. ‘There are men out here that do a lot worse, but because I’m a woman, you’re going to take this away from me?’ 7. ‘My wife is Japanese. My wife is Chinese. Sorry, that’s a terrible mistake to make.’ 8. ‘Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism; nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism.

Christmas quiz | 13 December 2018

A chain, but no barrier

On 26 August 1880 Henry Russell consummated his marriage in an unusual way. He was, to his own mind, married to the Vignemale, the highest French peak in the Pyrenees, and, wishing to spend the night with his beloved, he climbed to the 10,820ft summit and got his servants to dig a trench, bury him under earth and stones, wrapped in his sheepskin sleeping-bag, and leave him to the darkness. He survived and wrote of this night: ‘It seemed as though I had left the earth.’ Russell is one of the oddballs with whom Matthew Carr’s book teems. Another is Sabine Baring-Gould, the author of ‘Onward, Christian soldiers’, who in 1848 visited the Algerian emir Abd-el-Kader, imprisoned by the French in the château at Pau. He was not as impressed by this Sufi hero as most others were.

The kings of Soho

Christopher Howse has just written a book about Soho. He drank there regularly with Michael Heath, The Spectator’s cartoon editor, in the 1980s. Last week, in the editor’s office, they remembered a vanished world. MICHAEL HEATH: I introduced you to Soho. CHRISTOPHER HOWSE: Well, I don’t know if you’re entirely to blame for that. But you taught me a thing or two. HEATH: There were such things as groupies for cartoonists in those days. There were girls hanging round you in Fleet Street waiting for you to finish the drawings for the following day and then they’d go off with the cartoonists and have meals or go to various clubs. The cartoonists were wealthy, really, because it was cash in hand. You couldn’t get a cartoonist who was stable.

Christmas quiz | 25 December 2017

Weird world In 2017: 1. Police discovered thousands of what kind of plant growing in a disused nuclear bunker in Wiltshire? 2. Cuban exiles complained about an Irish postage stamp commemorating whom? 3. Which supermarket chain apologised for an advertisement before Easter that said: ‘Great offers on beer and cider. Good Friday just got better’? 4. Upon opening its first store on the Isle of Wight, which supermarket chain put on sale 10,000 commemorative shopping bags bearing the legend ‘Isle of White’? 5. Cinemas in Kuwait were prohibited from screening which Disney live-action film because a character was depicted as gay? 6. Scientists detected chemical signs of 8,000-year-old wine, the oldest yet found, in pottery in which Black Sea country? 7.