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Robin Ashenden

Robin Ashenden

The Spectator

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Lock and rudder / I’ve finally succumbed to a canal boat holiday

All my life I’ve wanted to take a narrow boat holiday down one of Britain’s canals but have never got round to it. There’s always been something...

31.05.2024 30

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

The hell of interior design

I spent seven hours yesterday cutting up cardboard boxes into little square pieces with a Stanley knife and stuffing them into rubbish sacks. I’ve...

22.05.2024 40

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Georgia’s ‘foreign agent’ law protestors won’t go down quietly

17.05.2024 80

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Arrabbiato / My battle with an Puglian pugilist

15.05.2024 20

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

A bloke’s guide to aftershave

In 2020, the year of coronavirus, I came to a fork in the road. I’d just turned 50, a moment of looking back over your life, realising what you’ve...

08.05.2024 20

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

The monstrous experience of surviving boarding school

Charles, Earl Spencer published a blistering denunciation of his prep school days – complete with constant corporal punishment and child abuse –...

28.04.2024 60

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

The Fiat 500 / A love letter

On visits to the continent as a child, what struck me was the strangeness of other European countries. Going to France or Italy, pre-internet, you cut...

22.04.2024 9

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Mermaids / How was ITV’s trans drama Butterfly ever made?

In the wake of the Cass Report’s damning verdict on the reckless ‘social transitioning’ of children and the prescribing of puberty blockers to...

15.04.2024 40

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Comedy / The sacking of Frank Skinner is a loss to British comedy

The recent news that comedian Frank Skinner had been sacked from his job at Absolute Radio after fifteen years as presenter feels like a misstep to...

14.04.2024 30

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Undercover agents / My loveless nights in a post-Soviet hostel

I suppose there are people who stay in four or five-star hotels all their lives and become a kind of expert in them, turning their noses up at rooms I...

09.04.2024 10

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Where have the West’s liberal values gone?

Russia is ramping up preparations for a ‘large-scale’ war with Nato. That’s the verdict of the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War,...

29.03.2024 20

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Watches satisfy a strange masculine urge

A year or two ago I got my first expensive watch, a Longines Conquest Heritage. It wasn’t quite my dream timepiece – that was a 1960s Omega...

27.03.2024 9

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

What my strange old friends taught me

As a young man I sought out the company of much older people in the arts, feeling they had some secret to life, often the same one in different...

20.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

The trials and tribulations of Orthodox Lent

The Russian Orthodox Church, which I converted to in 2018, has disgraced itself in the years since. Its Patriarch Kirill has oiled up to Vladimir...

17.03.2024 6

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Navalny’s death has left Russia’s opposition in despair

Following the wave of articles that have appeared in the Western press since Navalny’s death come three pieces from émigré Russians. All present a...

12.03.2024 7

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Lost friendships are a painful price of the Ukraine war

One thing you learn about war, if you are close enough for it to touch you, is that it splits the atom. Situations and relationships that have grown...

09.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Men don’t belong in Hampstead Ladies’ Pond

The waters of Hampstead ladies’ pond are this week, it seems, more troubled than ever. Last Sunday, amidst cries of ‘traitor’ and ‘shame on...

07.03.2024 10

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Nostrovia! / A Soviet guide to vodka

One of the perks – a perilous one – of visiting the Former Soviet Union in the 1990s was the cheapness of the vodka. I was used to paying London...

05.03.2024 20

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Up in the air / The horror of travelling with pets

It’s 7 in the morning, I’ve got to Milan Linate airport two hours before my plane to Bari, and already things are going horribly wrong. The...

27.02.2024 6

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

The key difference between Alexei Navalny and Vladimir Putin

Following Alexei Navalny’s suspicious ‘sudden death’ in an Arctic prison camp last Friday, two scenes immediately come to mind featuring...

19.02.2024 4

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Russia’s ‘Red Ripper’ Andrei Chikatilo was a uniquely Soviet serial killer

In the wake of Vladimir Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as atrocities like the killings at Bucha and Irpin came to light, there were repeated...

11.02.2024 10

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Lock-up and leave / My life in storage

I’m off to South Italy for a few months having recently sold my late mother’s house and, if I can find a nice immigration lawyer, perhaps longer....

07.02.2024 30

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Property pariah / I’ve been priced out of East Anglia

We have finally found a buyer for my late mother’s Suffolk house, but I’ve fallen into something of a trap. After the money’s divided and the...

17.01.2024 8

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Why New Year trumps Christmas in Russia

What a difference a decade makes. Exactly ten years ago, Russians celebrated New Year by watching Goluboi Ogoniek (‘Little Blue Light’) the...

30.12.2023 20

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Can Jilly Cooper wreck your life?

What do the names Octavia, Prudence, Harriet, and Imogen all have in common? If you don’t know the answer to that, you’re probably – unlike our...

26.12.2023 5

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Where did the Christmas magic go?

It’s late December 1982 or thereabouts, and I’m standing in a Suffolk church before hundreds of people, wearing a cassock and surplice, with a...

24.12.2023 9

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Hearing voices / Streaming killed the video star

One small but significant loss to culture that streaming sites like Netflix or Amazon Prime have ushered in is the slow death of the DVD commentary....

18.12.2023 4

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

Moving on / Letting go of my mother’s house

My mother passed away last year and it fell to me to sort out her house. Returning from four years in Russia and the Caucasus, I moved into her...

11.12.2023 30

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

What fiction can teach us about terrorism

The first decade of this century, following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, was something of a golden age...

05.12.2023 50

The Spectator

Robin Ashenden

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