Diary
Lord Marland
When people ask me how Tickets for Troops is going, I reply it’s going so well it’s like surfing — being transported on the crest of a wave, that is, hoping we will carry on and serenely land on the beach, rather than being dumped in a pile, caught out by some unsuspecting roller.
David Linley
The final printed copy of my new book has just arrived on my desk, and I can’t help but feel like a schoolboy opening my stocking on Christmas Day as I unwrap the cellophane and it creaks open in that delicious way that brand new books do.
Anthony Haden-Guest
Fast forwards. When the history of the American Empire is written one reason given for its decline may well be that they play the Wrong Sort of Football.
Caroline Michel
To celebrate the Spear's Book Awards on June 30th, Caroline Michel, one of the country's top literary agents and CEO of the PFD agency, has written the Spear's Diary for the forthcoming summer issue.
Andrew Roberts
An invitation arrives for the launch of Alain de Botton’s new book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which will doubtless be great fun. Yet it joins a weirdly bare mantelshelf.
Victoria Aitken
GSTAAD DIARY
Right off the train I went to the Palace Hotel to meet Ivan Lindsay, my holiday host. I wondered, could the chicest ski resort in the world sustain its reputation when the only thing crunchier than its fresh snow is the economy?
Hong Kong diary
An ex-pat living in Hong Kong told me last night that they knew what Superman must have felt after leaving Krypton, coming to Earth and discovering he was all-powerful.
Exclusive: Conrad Black's Jail Diary
"I write to you from a US federal prison. It is far from a country club or even a regimental health spa."
Spear's exclusively has the full-length version of Conrad Black's jail diary, written from his prison in Florida. For his unedited thoughts on law and order (or lack thereof) in the United States, click here.
Richard Kay
The ‘season’ is upon us, that extraordinary six weeks in which sport, opera and horticulture collide with social climbing, arcane dress codes, royalty and snobbery.
Books
Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour
Michael Lewis
Kyle Bass, a Texas-based hedge-fund manager who did well out of shorting the sub-prime property market before the 2008 financial crisis, used to play the international strategy board game Risk as a kid, which led him to find out everything about a tiny country called Iceland, which was a key strategic location in the game
The Gentry: Stories of the English
Adam Nicolson
How delicious the notion of the gentry is. How beautifully it shades into every kind of 19th-century fraudulence, into Eric Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition. How easily it locks on to the much later and altogether more middle-class idea of the gentleman
Zahawi and Hancock on 'Masters of Nothing'
Anne McElvoy
The Wide Blue Yonder
A new breed of Tory MPs emerged from the 2010 general election, and already some are making their mark. Anne McElvoy looks at two of Cameron’s cabal
HNW Events
Spear's/Speechly Bircham Seminar: How to be a philanthropist in the 21st century
21 February 2012
Spear's Young Turk Awards 2012
01 April 2012
Spear's Design for Living Awards 2012
01 May 2012
Spear's Wealth Insight Forum 2012
19 September 2012
The Diary
Mark Hix
04 Jan 2012
Amanda Palmer
22 Nov 2011
Patrick Perrin
11 Oct 2011
Nicky Haslam
05 Aug 2011
Stephen Webster
06 Jul 2011
