Will Self | The Spectator columnists & writers

Back in 1997 when I was narked on by a fellow journalist (Simon Walters, currently of the Times, then of the Express) for taking class As on the Prime Minister’s press plane, I sought to restore my reputation by giving an interview to a maverick young libertarian on the Telegraph. Boris Johnson wrote up our encounter favourably, along the classic out-of-Alexander-Pope-by-way-of-William-Rees-Mogg lines of ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ and ever since then I’ve found it hard to think altogether badly of him. Anyway, leaving the country last week, and with it a Tory party as self-obsessed and self-deluding as any junkie, it occurred to me it was time to return the favour: I’d like to use the pages of another of Johnson’s former bully-pulpits to invite him to grant me his first interview after he leaves office in September.

The Soviets were imperialists. Stalin’s architecture proves it

The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has rendered what might otherwise have seemed a fairly niche study of a Soviet-era architect rather more resonant. Boris Iofan was born to a Russian-speaking Jewish family in Odessa in 1891. After initial studies in his home city and a brief period working with his older brother Dimitri in St Petersburg, he fled the war engulfing Tsarist Russia for Italy, where he trained at the Istituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Rome. During his ten years abroad he married a half-Russian, half-Italian aristocratic divorcée, became a communist, palled up with the future Soviet premier Aleksei Rykov (who was to act as his political patron before being purged), and saturated himself in the odd melange of classicism, monumentalism and quasi-modernism which was to become his architectural style.

Why America’s attitude to mental illness is dangerously deluded

A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got a borderline personality disorder...’ I check her there: ‘What do you mean by that?’ She thinks for a moment and continues: ‘Well, she’s very emotional, she can’t maintain relationships, and she’s very defiant…’ I wait for a moment to see if there’s anything else before I say my bit: ‘Perhaps she just has a bad character — because fundamentally that’s all a personality disorder is: epithetic psychiatry. There’s no defined organic basis for these so-called disorders, no psycho-dynamic aetiology either, no progression — and, of course, no cure.’ My friend doesn’t really absorb this information. Indeed, it’s as if she can’t hear it at all; she continues talking about the young woman in the same vein, before casually affixing another label to her troubled psyche: ‘She’s bipolar as well.

Don’t buy The Glass Cage at the airport if you want a restful flight, warns Will Self

Nicholas Carr has a bee in his bonnet, and given his susceptibilities this might well be a cybernetic insect, cunningly constructed by a giant tech company with the express purpose of irritating him — a likely culprit might be the Tyrell Corporation in Ridley Scott’s future-dystopic film Blade Runner. In 2012 Carr — whose name has homophonic overtones of Cassandra — published a minatory work on the internet and the web called The Shallows. The title does indeed say it all: Carr’s view was that our increasing use of these technologies is having an impact on our cognitive and other physical faculties, and that by and large it’s a negative one. Now Carrsandra is back to tell us that lurking behind the glassy screens we love to pet, prod and goggle at, there lies a glass cage of automated systems, ones that increasingly manage the extraction of raw materials, their processing, the manufacture of goods, the provision of services and the intellectual labour of their overall control.

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