The Spectator is a weekly British political and cultural news magazine. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving magazine in the world. The Spectator is politically conservative, and its principal subject areas are politics and culture. Alongside columns and features on current affairs, the magazine also contains arts pages on books, music, opera, film, and TV reviews. It had an average circulation of 107,812 as of December 2023, excluding Australia.
Craig Edward Moncrieff Brown is an English critic and satirist, best known for parliamentary sketch writing, humorous articles and parodies for newspapers and magazines including The Times, the Daily Mail and Private Eye.
Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, 7Q5 is the designation for a small Greek papyrus fragment discovered in Qumran Cave 7. It contains about 18 legible or partially legible Greek letters and was published in 1962 as an unidentified text. The editor assigned the fragment to a date between 50 BCE and 50 CE on the basis of its handwriting. In 1972, the Spanish papyrologist Jose O'Callaghan argued that the papyrus was in fact a fragment of the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 52 and 53. While most scholars have been unpersuaded by this argument, a vocal minority continue to support the identification of the fragment as a part of the Gospel of Mark.
Carsten Peter Thiede OCF KStJ was a German archaeologist and New Testament scholar. He was also a member of PEN and appointed a Knight of Justice of the Order of St John. He taught as professor of New Testament times and history at the Staatsunabhängige Theologische Hochschule (STH) in Basel and at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel. He often advanced theories that conflicted with the consensus of academic and theological scholarship.
The "Magdalen" papyrus was purchased in Luxor, Egypt in 1901 by Reverend Charles Bousfield Huleatt (1863–1908), who identified the Greek fragments as portions of the Gospel of Matthew and presented them to Magdalen College, Oxford, where they are catalogued as P. Magdalen Greek 17 from which they acquired their name. When the fragments were published by Colin Henderson Roberts in 1953, illustrated with a photograph, the hand was characterized as "an early predecessor of the so-called 'Biblical Uncial'" which began to emerge towards the end of the 2nd century. The uncial style is epitomised by the later biblical Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus. Comparative paleographical analysis has remained the methodological key for dating the manuscript, but there is no consensus on the dating of the papyrus. Estimates have ranged from the 1st century to the 4th century AD.
Panagiotis "Taki" Theodoracopulos is a Greek writer and publisher who founded Taki's Magazine and co-founded The American Conservative. His column "High Life" appeared in British weekly The Spectator from 1977 to 2023. He has lived in New York City, London, and Gstaad.
Simon James Heffer is an English historian, journalist, author and political commentator. He has published several biographies and a series of books on the social history of Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. He was appointed professorial research fellow at the University of Buckingham in 2017.
Sir Simon David Jenkins FLSW is a British author, a newspaper columnist and editor. He was editor of the Evening Standard from 1976 to 1978 and of The Times from 1990 to 1992.
Stephen Glover is a British journalist and columnist for the Daily Mail.
Anthony Michell Howard, CBE was a British journalist, broadcaster and writer. He was the editor of the New Statesman and The Listener and the deputy editor of The Observer. He selected the passages used in The Crossman Diaries, a book of entries taken from Richard Crossman's The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister.
Vitali Vitaliev is a Ukrainian-born journalist and writer who has worked in Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia and Ireland.
Robert James Kenneth Peston is an English journalist, presenter, and author. He is the Political Editor of ITV News and host of the weekly political discussion show Peston alongside ITV News Deputy Political Editor Anushka Asthana. From 2006 until 2014, he was the Business Editor of BBC News and its Economics Editor from 2014 to 2015. He became known to the wider public with his reporting on the 2007–2008 financial crisis, especially with his exclusive information on the Northern Rock crisis. He is the founder of the education charity Speakers for Schools.
José O'Callaghan Martínez, SJ was a Spanish Jesuit priest, papyrologist and Biblical scholar.
Fraser Andrew Nelson is a British political journalist who was editor of The Spectator magazine from 2009 to 2024.
Philip John Purser was a British television critic and novelist.
Robert Timothy Dowling is an American journalist and author who writes a weekly column in The Guardian about his life with his family in London.
Max Pemberton is a British medical doctor, journalist and author. He works full-time as a psychiatrist in the National Health Service (NHS). He is a weekly columnist for the Daily Mail, writing comment on news events concerning culture, social and ethical issues, the politics of health care and the NHS. Before his move to the Daily Mail, he was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph. He also writes a monthly column for Reader’s Digest and is a regular contributor to The Spectator. He is the editor of Spectator Health, a quarterly supplement from The Spectator.
Tarzie Vittachi, was a Sri Lankan journalist. He was born in Colombo, Ceylon. Vittachi authored two popular columns "Bouquets and Brickbats", and "Fly by Night" in the Ceylon Daily News. He later became the youngest editor of the oldest newspaper in Asia, The Ceylon Observer, which was founded in 1834. He wrote a book known as Emergency 58 about the country's race riots in 1958 that won him the Magsaysay Prize in 1959. From 1957 he was chairman of the World Subud Association for 25 years. From 1960 to 1965 he was Asian director of the International Press Institute, an organization of editors devoted to promoting the freedom of the press. He was, at the same time, a correspondent for The Economist, the BBC and The Sunday Times of London and wrote a column for Newsweek. A book about the role of the Children's Fund in arranging truces to protect children in time of conflict, called "Between the Guns", was published posthumously.
Peter Hoskin is a British journalist. He is the Games Critic for The Daily Mail, and at the end of October 2022 became books and culture editor of Prospect magazine.
Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess is a biography of the Soviet spy Guy Burgess by historian Andrew Lownie.
