Best of the Spectator

President Biden has spent the week meeting with foreign leaders including Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Now, the number of people starting to speculate about the state Joe Biden’s health is growing. Freddy Gray sits down with Amber Athey, the Washington Editor for The Spectator to discuss where the cracks are beginning to show and what this could mean for Kamala Harris. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Sarah Rainsford was a BBC foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow for 20 years until August when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) declared Rainsford a national security threat. They expelled her from Russia and gave her only three weeks to pack up her things, bring home her husband and their dog. On the podcast, Sarah goes back to her youth to share how she fell into learning Russian and the adventures she got up to as a Cambridge student during her year abroad in St Petersburg during the fall of the Soviet Union.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week’s episode: can the new Aukus alliance contain China? In his cover piece this week, James Forsyth writes that the new Aukus pact has fixed the contours of the next 30 years of British foreign policy. Britain, he says, is no longer trying to stay neutral in the competition between America and China. On the podcast James is joined by Francis Pike, author of Empires at War: A Short History of Modern Asia Since World War II, who also wrote for the magazine this week, giving the case against Aukus. (00:45)Also this week: what can be done to save the Church of England’s parishes? Back in February, Emma Thompson, a rural parish volunteer, and the Reverend Marcus Walker, Rector of St Bartholomew the Great, London, wrote pieces for the Spectator expressing their concern for the future of the Church of England’s parish system. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York dismissed these concerns as scaremongering from ‘rascally voices’. Seven months on there is a new threat to the parish, which Emma writes about in this week’s magazine. She is joined by Marcus on the podcast to explain what you can do to save your local church. . (16:35)And finally: in a time when travel has never been faster, why has so little been done to reform queues? This is the question Harry Mount asks in the magazine this week. He sits down with me now, with the Spectator’s Wiki Man columnist, Rory Sutherland to pitch some transformative ideas on how to update this very British pastime.  (29:10)Hosted by William MooreProduced by Sam Holmes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week's Book Club podcast Sam is joined by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, a historian of psychoanalysis whose latest book is Freud's Patients: A Book of Lives. Mikkel has sifted through the archives to discover the real stories anonymised in the case studies on which Sigmund Freud based his theories, and the lives of the patients who submitted to analysis on the great man's original couch. What he discovered is startling. Mikkel tells Sam how Freud falsified the data to fit his theories, kept incurable cases coming back week after week to keep the fees rolling in - and how the global industry of Freudian analysis resembles a religious cult more than a science. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

For China, WWII started in 1937 with the Japanese invasion, two years before Hitler invaded Poland. Japan would occupy China until its surrender in 1945, in the process committing atrocities like the rape of Nanjing. This was the second Japanese invasion in fifty years. Yet decades after the war, when I grew up in Nanjing, Japanese food was all the craze and it was Japanese anime that kids watched and Japanese fashion that teenagers craved. So has China got over its wartime hatred of Japan?On this episode, I’m joined by the Tokyo-based Chinese translator Dylan Levi King, who you might remember from our previous conversation on ketamine use in China. We’re going to be chatting about China’s attitude to Japan today, and the contradictions within that, rather than focusing on the history between the two countries. If you want to learn more about that part of things – there’s nowhere better to go than Professor Rana Mitter’s book, China’s War with Japan. Dylan and I chat about the Chinese caricatures of Japanese soldiers on screen, the Japanese porn star who overcame the two countries’ enmity and the jingri – the Chinese who identify as ‘spiritually Japanese’.Dylan reflects on the cognitive dissonance – or disassociation – that the Chinese hold between Japanese politics and Japanese soft power. For example, he tells me that:‘I used to go to this clothing store when I was a student in China, and in the store they would sell Japanese fashion like BAPE, but on the doorstep walking into the place there was a Japanese flag on the ground, so you could trample on the Japanese flag as you walk into buy all your Japanese fashion.’Japanese nationalism, in return, seems to be getting louder, whether it’s visits to the Yasukuni shrine housing war criminals, or a continued refusal to acknowledge the war-time trafficking of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves – euphemistically known as ‘comfort women’. Yet Dylan argues that this is just all bark, no bite:‘China rising on its doorstep and Japan’s economy, since 1990, not really improving, has exacerbated that feeling in Japan of wanting to stand up, even though they can’t really. So it’s all performative and useless.’ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's episode, Fraser Nelson starts by reading the leader. Britain has a labour shortage and our immigration system is a mess - why not have an amnesty for migrants without legal status? (01:00) Michela Wrong is on next. She found herself in the sights of Rwandan President Paul Kagame after she wrote a book exposing the abuses of his regime. (07:05)Mark Mason reads his piece to finish the podcast. Ordering at the bar isn't just about buying a drink, he says. (20:00) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Say what you like about Pope Francis, but he's incapable of giving a boring in-flight interview. On Wednesday, coming back from Hungary and Slovakia, he was asked about the problem of pro-abortion Catholic politicians receiving Holy Communion. He immediately launched into a ferocious denunciation of abortion, describing it as homicide, saying there was no middle way and stating that support for abortion was grounds for 'excommunication'. Francis then slightly qualified this by explaining that these 'excommunicated' Catholics needed to be lovingly shown the error of their ways, but it was hard to escape the obvious conclusion. The Pope regards the President as barred from Communion – which drives a horse and cart through the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy of Biden's own bishop, Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington. In this week's Holy Smoke, Dr Ed Condon, canon lawyer and editor of the brilliant Catholic website The Pillar, offers us an admirably lucid 'explainer' on this complicated topic. His conclusion is basically the same as mine. Though Ed wouldn't put it this way, the Pope has just thrown the fanatically pro-choice President of the United States under the bus.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this week’s episode: is Brexit to blame for the rise in blue-collar wages? With labour shortages driving wages up, many have blamed Britain’s removal from the single market. However, this week in The Spectator, Matthew Lynn argues that shocks and price signals are how the free-market economy reorganises, and that we are experiencing a global trend just like America and Germany. Simon Jenkins, columnist for the Guardian, joins Matthew to discuss. (00:45)Also this week: the British Medical Association has dropped its opposition to assisted dying, but is euthanasia really a dignified and painless process? Dr Joel Zivot asks this question in The Spectator magazine, drawing upon his own experience as an expert witness against the use of lethal injection in America. Dr Jacky Davis, radiologist and chair of the Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying, disagrees. Davis, who pushed the motion causing the BMA to change its position, calls claims that assisted dying is a painful process 'unscientific shroud-waving', a claim she debates with Dr Zivot this week. (13:43)And finally, Non-Fungible Tokens are selling at extortionate prices online, and are proudly hanging on the virtual walls of many. But can they really be considered art? Jack Rivlin writes about his own experience of purchasing NFTs in this week's Spectator. He is joined by Nima Sagharachi, director of Middle Eastern, Islamic and South Asian Art at Bonhams. (30:20)Hosted by William MooreProduced by Sam Holmes and Oscar Edmondson Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Sam is joined by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst - whose latest book is The Turning Point: A Year That Changed Dickens and the World. On the podcast he speaks about how 1851 - the year of the Great Exhibition - served as a pivot in Dickens’s own life, and set him on the path to writing Bleak House. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ed Balls is an acclaimed broadcaster, writer, economist, professor and former politician who served as shadow chancellor from 2011 to 2015. On the podcast, he tells Lara and Liv about the importance of Sunday lunches growing up, his long history of making bespoke children's birthday cakes and the times he turned his campaign team into a makeshift kitchen staff. All this and more is documented in his new book Appetite, out now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.