I don’t hoard, there isn’t room for that indulgence in a small late Victorian terraced house; so it is giving me immense pleasure to read a copy of The Spectator dated 27 February 1988.
It was on top of a pile of vintage magazines outside the shower room where I am staying. I might add my bedside reading is of the highest quality and mostly recent hardbacks. I recommend Ariane Bankes’s The Quality of Love which I read but have not written about because a friend borrowed it.
In many ways The Spectator hasn’t changed over the last thirty-six years. The Crossword prize is still £20, at least for the runners-up. There are still the same columns but what joy it gives me to read the columnists and reviewers of yore. David Hare’s Diary could have been written today. He muses “why is the Right in such a bad temper”? “It has become unbearable to Thatcherites that there should be non-Thatcherites.” “Why it might be a good idea to vote Labour at the next election.”
Auberon Waugh’s Another Voice column is as trenchant, relevant, offensive and very funny as the day he penned it in the Regent Hotel in Sydney. His opinion of the opera house and aborigines is as unorthodox today as in 1988. The cartoons are about AIDS and The Bonfire of the Vanities. There is a profile, unsigned, of David Stevens – at least one reader will remember him because he was sacked by Lord Stevens of Ludgate. Christopher Fildes’s City and Surburban column continues in the same vein today written by Martin Vander Weyer. There is a letter from Radek Sikorsky about Afghanistan, written from 42 Blenheim Crescent W11.
Charles Moore writes A South African Journal, and there are book reviews by Ferdinand Mount, David Profumo, J. L. Carr, Harriet Waugh, Anita Brookner and Allan Massie. Giles Auty reviews a David Bomberg exhibition at The Tate, just The Tate; the TM opened in 2000. Best of all there is a review of Withnail and I by Hilary Mantel. I apologise for quoting her out of context but she writes “Bruce Robinson’s semi-autobiographical film is a dry, slight, small-scale comedy”. The film today, as you know, is a cult classic in the same league as Local Hero and The Italian Job. Bruce Robinson is still with us, living in Herefordshire and plagued by tinnitus.
The columns at the end are vintage Spectator: High Life (Taki), Home Life (Alice Thomas Ellis), Restaurant (Jennifer Patterson). Her review of her local Italian in Pimlico is mixed and she may have found it embarrassing to go back. Her conclusion is Delphic. “The service was attentive, and why not? But the atmosphere is slightly ominous and smacking of bicycle parts.” The advertisement on the back page brings back memories of the golden days of cigarette advertising.
And here’s a hit from 1988.