Emily Hill | The Spectator columnists & writers

The absurd theatre of Amber Heard vs Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp, a Hollywood star whose career currently consists of a perfume advert, is suing his ex-wife Amber Heard, a Hollywood actress who didn’t star in anything before she met him, for defamation. He says that she destroyed his career by telling the world he’s a wife-beater – and he wants $50 million in compensation. She says he is destroying her career by denying it – and wants $100 million ‘for nuisance’. Unfortunately, only one of them is any good at acting – which makes this trial a real nail biter for the folks back home drenched in Dior Sauvage who feel the only crime Johnny Depp ever committed was breaking up with Winona Ryder. What is clear to anyone paying attention to this drama is that Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s marriage was abusive.

The Edition

Can Elon Musk take on the tech censors?

25 min listen

The Edition

Can Elon Musk take on the tech censors?

25 min listen

In this week’s episode: Is Elon Musk heading for a clash with the British Government over free speech?Elon Musk is buying Twitter. But might the Tesla CEO be in for a battle he wasn’t expecting with the UK government? Spectator Editor Fraser Nelson writes about this potential clash in this week’s issue and he joins the podcast to expand on his thesis. (00:49)Also this week: Where is it ever ok to stare at someone? If you’ve been on the tube recently you might have spotted a rather startling sign. This poster warns passengers about intrusive staring on public transport, so as to protect women from feeling intimidated on their commute. But who, we ask, will speak up for those who love staring at people on public transport? The answer is Cosmo Landesman who defends his love of people watching in this week’s Spectator.

How I finally learned to love my eco-home

Nine years ago, when I invested every-thing I had in a part-rent, part-buy, one-bedroom, government-backed eco-home which proved to be a boiling box in summer, my first instinct was to throw myself out of a window – but I couldn’t because they opened only ten centimetres. My second was to complain about it in The Spectator. Now, I return to update you on my energy bills. Prepare to turn green with envy. Friends who live successful sorts of lives – involving houses, spouses and gardens – exclaim ‘Oh, so you weren’t joking about living in a J.G. Ballard novel?’ when they come around for the book launches I host in my living room, before asking if I can open a window. ‘I can actually,’ I boast. ‘The restrictors were removed on humanitarian grounds and a man in the block next door fell out and died last year in circumstances still unreported in any newspaper.

AOC, America’s youngest congresswoman, has already been compared with FDR and JFK

‘Who is AOC?’ the back cover of this book asks. ‘A wack job!’ says Donald Trump. ‘She needs to run for president when she turns 35,’ Cardi B explains. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest congresswoman in America. She goes by her initials (like FDR and JFK) and is a Latina from the Bronx and Westchester, with no background in policy making, a bartender. She has a boyfriend; she uses social media to communicate with fans and fight with political foes, and also to cook ramen noodles in front of millions of people while chatting with them about structural inequality and mass incarceration. And every one of these things winds up meaning so much. Take Up Space is a ‘kaleidoscopic biography’, assembled by the editors of New York magazine.

Is it really a crime to stare?

‘A sky full of stars and he was staring at her’ is a love poem by a dead Roman but on the London Underground, all a man will find if he looks skyward is a TFL advert warning him if he stares at me in an Attican fashion I’m to call the police. ‘Staring’ (Sadiq Khan’s bright red public safety warning reads – with ominous eyeballs popping out of the ‘a’ and the ‘g’) that may be construed as ‘intense’ and of ‘sexual nature’ is now ‘sexual harassment’ and ‘not tolerated’. Should anyone ‘see it or experience it’ they are to text the British Transport Police or dial an 0800 sexual harassment hotline if they want to remain anonymous. Silence is violence, so staring is a sex crime. TFL's new poster Assessed purely on the grounds of common sense this is a strange poster to erect because the overwhelming majority of Londoners take no interest in each other whatsoever so causing them to fear that they are, in fact, being stared at, and should report such stares, seems likely to increase incidences of staring.

The curious cult of self love

As Sigmund Freud once told me in a YouTube video: ‘Who lacks sex – speaks about sex, hungry talks about food, a person who has no money – about money, and our oligarchs and bankers talk about morality.’ So beware anyone who starts preaching ‘self-love’ at you. Chances are they hate themselves quite as much as you do – if not more so – and have been duped by the latest fad into revealing their deeply narcissistic behaviour patterns. Tenets from the social media church of self-help include 'do whatever feels right'; 'if people don't like you for who you are, that's their problem'; 'you don't owe anybody anything'; 'always trust your feelings' and (my personal favourite) 'guilt is a wasted emotion' (it’s what psychopaths are unable to feel).

The indomitable popularity of Joe Rogan

‘Nobody has stronger opinions about Joe Rogan than people who have never listened to Joe Rogan,’ is Edward Snowden’s view but I am the exception that proves the rule because the more I listen to him the more I profess my love for him. At points in the past year, the Joe Rogan podcast has been all that’s prevented me hurling myself out of the window with Elizabeth Day’s latest book. If you feel isolated and lonely in the post-lockdown world you might find yourself – among the legions of truck drivers stuck in cabs and Amazon workers waiting for robots to replace them – falling for him too. The Joe Rogan Experience, as the podcast the comedian started with friends in 2009 is now called, begins with a cry of ‘hello freak bitches’ before launching into hour long conversations in which Quentin Tarantino talks about his film career, Bret Weinstein explores the political climate that led to him getting kicked out of Evergreen, Alex Jones performs his conspiracy theory greatest hits, Annie Jacobsen explains Operation Paperclip, Leah Rimini details her escape from Scientology or Tim Dillon – controversially for a comedian – makes jokes.

Playboy’s shameless bid to distance itself from Hugh Hefner

‘Get woke, go broke’ is the rule that explains the collapse of so many powerful institutions which profess social justice principles before asphyxiating on their own hypocrisy. Playboy may be the next corporation to consign itself to oblivion. This week, it distanced itself from its late founder, Hugh Hefner. It's a mission that is doomed to failure. 'Today's Playboy is not Hugh Hefner's Playboy,' we were informed in an open letter published on Playboy's website. The statement came after various 'Bunnies' told a TV documentary that Hefner drugged, groomed and secretly filmed girls and celebrity guests at his mansion. Linda Lovelace, the 1970s porn star who starred in Deep Throat, alleges that Hefner made her indulge in bestiality with a German Shepherd and had an interest in snuff films.

I stand with Novak Djokovic

Is anyone else alarmed by the widespread glee at the way Novak Djokovic has been treated by the Aussies? The world's top tennis player is in an immigration detention hotel in Melbourne, fighting to avoid being deported. Djokovic, who was granted a medical exemption to defend his title in the Australian Open, somehow snuck into the country with a bunch of tennis racquets before he was intercepted by the Australian authorities. The media is labelling Djokovic’s case as yet another example of ‘rules for thee and not for me’. But it isn't, because he hasn’t formulated any of the arbitrary and draconian Covid diktats imposed on the rest of us. Djokovic’s only crime was to adopt a ‘keep calm and carry on playing tennis’ response to the pandemic.

Emily Ratajkowski is having her cake and eating it

After listening to an hour-and-a-half of Emily Ratajkowski talking about My Body I had to look up naked pictures of her on the internet to understand what she was complaining about. She arrived fully clothed to the 'How To Academy' to be interviewed by Pandora Sykes. This made it hard to know whether her dangerous-sounding upbringing as ‘an only child in a house with no walls’ had affected her physically. ‘It had a profound effect on me,’ Emily told Pandora, explaining that she gets the ‘woozies’ to this day. For those of you who have absolutely no idea who Ratajkowski is, never mind what she’s saying, Wikipedia explains her surname is pronounced ‘rata-cow-ski’ and she is an American model: ‘Born in London to American parents and raised in San Diego, she first appeared on the cover of the March 2012 issue of the erotic magazine treats!, which led to her appearing in two music videos.

Spectator Out Loud

Leo McKinstry, Emily Hill and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

Spectator Out Loud

Leo McKinstry, Emily Hill and Daisy Dunn

19 min listen

On this week's episode, Leo McKinstry starts by arguing that having to sell the family home to pay for social care is not an injustice. (00:50) Then, Emily Hill reads her piece. She's not looking forward to the return of hugging. (08:00) Daisy Dunn finishes the podcast by examining the underappreciated art of asparagus. (12:30)

Hugs vs the hug-nots: where do you stand?

On Monday, the Prime Minister says, we can hug again. Personally, I never stopped, but then I’ve been corrupted by southerners, foreigners, posh boys and gorgeous homosexuals. In luvvie land (aka London and Twitter), there’s this perception that everyone is desperate to rush into one another’s arms because they’ve desisted for so long. In many places outside the M25, that idea is so nuts it’s comical. In Norfolk, where I was raised, most people meet with a nod and a grunt, and it is the height of good manners not to ‘look at anyone funny’ (in other words, we don’t make eye contact with strangers). If any outsider tries to offer a hug next week, they’ll likely get clobbered. For those of us who like hugging, Monday’s easing of restrictions will be embraced with delight.

The Edition

The break-up: Is Boris about to lose Scotland?

40 min listen

The Edition

The break-up: Is Boris about to lose Scotland?

40 min listen

Could No. 10 infighting lose the Union? (00:40) When should the government tell us how to behave? (13:20) Can a relationship work without hugging for a year? (31:30) With The Spectator’s deputy political editor Katy Balls; The Spectator’s Scotland editor Alex Massie; vice chair of Ogilvy and Spectator columnist Rory Sutherland; Deirdre McCloskey, Professor of Economics, History, English and Communications at University of Illinois at Chicago; writer Rob Palk; and journalist Emily Hill. Presented by Lara Prendergast. Produced by Max Jeffery and Charlie Price.

Spare me the cult of Sally Rooney

I have invented a new literary category, chic lit, to describe all the books written by elite females (Lena Dunham, Caitlin Moran, Elizabeth Day, Dolly Alderton, Sally Rooney, ad infinitum) for elite females. If you’re not one and can’t stand any of them, god help you. Their books will be forced on you anyway. Publishers can’t hear you scream. There is no metric for books kicked around living rooms or dumped in charity shops. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for instance, is the worst novel I’ve ever finished. I had to. I was that appalled. According to Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, all a woman wants nowadays is ‘someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about… what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them’.

The Edition

Divided nation: will Covid rules tear the country apart?

37 min listen

The Edition

Divided nation: will Covid rules tear the country apart?

37 min listen

In lockdown, green privilege is real

Long ago, a friend warned me I was living in a J.G. Ballard novel, but only in lockdown has the plot of High-Rise started to unfurl on the banks of the Thames. Developers are forced to build a certain number of homes for Londoners who could never otherwise afford anything, and height comes at a premium. So we’re stuck on the lower floors, in small, airless flats, overlooking land we’re not allowed to stray on to, as the rich exist in splendid corona-isolation above, peer down from their balconies and call security — to persecute us by making hints and suggestions. Ten days ago, a letter was stuffed underneath my door. ‘Complaints have been received regarding the strong odour of cannabis smoke being emitted from your apartment which is causing distress and discomfort to other residents,’ the denunciation read.

How I finally came to terms with my sister’s death

‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of unpaid debt. ‘When you were nine, you had a pink coat that you loved so much you wore it all the time, even on the early morning flight to Tunisia,’ Gavanndra Hodge begins, talking to her younger sister Candy, who’s been dead for 30 years. ‘It was long and thickly padded and made you look like a flamboyant Michelin Man.’ Hours after that flight Candy is killed by a virus as inexplicable as the one currently causing hundreds of thousands deaths, and Hodge stares into her coffin, noting the strange softness that comes just before decay. I saw all the artifice, the makeup, the smile made by men in white laboratory coats pushing at the corners of your mouth, a child transfixed in a plastic moment, dead but not dead, hyper-real, rouge on your cheeks, pink lipstick on your lips… You read with all the terror of being suddenly confronted by the same ‘crazy indulgence of loving people who die’.

Having a baby is like joining a cult — full of other, more capable mothers

When you’re not a mother it’s hard to imagine what motherhood is like. Anyone you know who becomes one assures you that you have no idea what it’s like, and replaces you with some other woman who does, and you never see her again. The End. So then you have to tax your mother on the subject. ‘What’s it like — giving birth?’ And she says: ‘It’s fine. You just breathe,’ before snorting derisively, ‘but she had gas and air’ when an aunt later claims to have done it without any pain relief. In the absence of any actual information from any source whatsoever you start to blame the omertà on the idea that childbirth is exactly like that scene in Alien in which a bloody, flesh-coloured thing bursts out of John Hurt, and all the rest is screaming.

Carry on up the Zambezi

I loved this book so much I was appalled. Why, when bookshops are stacked full of memoirs by authors who can’t write, isn’t Alexandra Fuller heaped up in perilous piles so near the till it’s impossible to evade her? This is like one of the most alluring Svetlana Alexievich testimonies, as if it had wandered out of the USSR and got lost in central Africa by way of a hospital in Budapest. It’s packed with exquisite jokes, quotes and details — such as when a doctor appears and ‘his gauzy green scrubs puffed out in great billows, the surgical-garb equivalent of Princess Di’s wedding dress’. Fuller started out trying to write novels before putting her own parents down on paper. The first instalment of their lives was the bestseller Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, followed by the also wonderfully titled Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness and Leaving Before the Rains Come.

‘Bob Dylan? He’s like Confucius’: Cerys Matthews interviewed

‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ was a Christmas classic for more than half a century until people suddenly began to worry that it was about yuletide date rape. ‘It was because of the video Tom Jones and I made,’ says Cerys Matthews, in her smoky Welsh lilt. She recorded a cover with Jones in 1999. The video showed the craggy old Welsh crooner slip something in her drink that turns Cerys into a high camp vamp. ‘The song is really innocent and beautiful and fun — it’s got a huge heap of humour and wit and I love it. That song is not our enemy. That woman is a strong woman. She’s there because she wants to be! It’s cold outside. They’re making love. Come on!’ Cerys herself was exposed to explicitrecord content when she was a child.

More sinister than sweet

Ordinarily, I love books that answer questions I’ve never asked, but Simon May’s baffling book has blown my mind. The self-deprecator in me wants to tell you I’m too stupid to understand a word of it. The rest of me suspects that this is a sneaking yet sparkling satire on what a university education will get you (£50,000 of debt and the authority to pronounce a penguin cuter than a mermaid). I like the visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London very much. ‘What is a bear with the head of a wolf?’, he demands. ‘Who is a human with cat’s eyes? What is the inner world of a sphinx “really”?’ He writes brilliantly and quotes exuberantly. The problem is his subject. Early on he explains that his approach to ‘Cute’ was inspired by Susan Sontag’s Notes On ‘Camp’ and Harry Frankfurt’s essay ‘On Bullshit’.

A girl with green eyes

I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s left of him is a stained T-shirt. I must rid my mind of him now. That’s long overdue. But how? These three books seem to present three answers. I’ve been wonkily underlining whole paragraphs and brooding over what to do. Nowadays, if you admit to being heartbroken after the fact you’re treated as a malingerer. So I very much appreciated Giulia Sissa’s Jealousy: A Forbidden Passion — a scholarly defence of indulging your violent fury. In the age of Tinder, your next paramour is but a thumb-swipe away, so the attitude is: ‘They don’t love you. Why would you care? It’s all in your head. It’s all in your past.

The importance of being trolled

Ever since a Twitter troll was elected 45th President of the United States, the Twitterati has agonised over who to blame. But since it was Twitter that gave American voters unfettered access to Donald Trump’s brain, they really ought to be blaming Twitter itself. It’s not possible to say anything balanced or nuanced in 140 characters — that’s a format for jokes, insults and outrage. If you want to seize the world’s attention today, you must troll or be trolled on Twitter. And since this is the one skill at which Trump is utterly unrivalled, he’s now busy trolling both America and himself. When a man with barely any followers once tweeted him in the middle of the night to say: ‘I firmly believe that @realDonaldTrump is the most superior troll on the whole of Twitter’, Trump retweeted it to his millions of followers: ‘A great compliment!’ Emily Hill and Alex Krasodomski-Jones, a trolling researcher, join the podcast: In 2017, our ability to write books, act in films or even govern appears to be measured in Twitter followers, not talent.

A disgrace to feminism

‘I was single, straight, and female,’ Emily Witt begins, with all the élan of an alcoholic stating her name and what’s wrong with her. Only there isn’t anything wrong with Emily Witt. (The book jacket tells us she has three degrees and won a Fulbright scholarship to Mozambique.) Unless you count not having a fella in your fourth decade. Which she does. And doesn’t. Future Sex is a collection of essays about sex and society, originally published in magazines including N+1, GQ and the London Review of Books, packaged into book form. In America, it enjoyed rave reviews. Here, it’s had a sexy reprint by Faber. I got very excited too, for the first two chapters, when Witt seemed to be asking the question no one ever poses: ‘Why, when we enjoy all the freedom women would have killed for throughout three millennia, do we still feel we’ve failed if we’ve not snared a man for better or worse?’ Feminists used to tell us that we’d been liberated: that a woman without a man was like a fish without a bicycle.

‘The woman is a disaster!’: Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton

We’re closing 2016 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 1: Emily Hill's interview with Camille Paglia, in which the iconoclastic professor labels Hillary Clinton a 'disaster' Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road constantly asking for money and most women find that life too harsh, too draining,’ Paglia argues.

Julia’s Baby

Julia should not have come to the wedding. That much was clear as soon as she arrived. Late, she was, and massive in belly. Her hat festooned with tropical fruit; her dress — hideously colourful. She made the hinges shriek on the great church door and winced, as it slammed shut, with a shudder. Puffing out her cheeks, she waddled slowly towards the nearest pew. She had a fist jammed into the small of her back, as if she were expecting to give birth at any moment. Everyone turned round to stare. The vicar got confused, forgot his lines, began to stammer. The bride stood at the altar, in an ill-advised orgy of organza and tulle, said something no one heard. The groom started coughing and the best man also. A hissing came from the bridesmaids, taffeta skirts bristling, as they squirmed to get a better view.

‘Hillary Clinton is a disaster!’

Talking to Camille Paglia is like approaching a machine gun: madness to stick your head up and ask a question, unless you want your brain blown apart by the answer, but a visceral delight to watch as she obliterates every subject in sight. Most of the time she does this for kicks. It’s only on turning to Hillary Clinton that she perpetrates an actual murder: of Clinton II’s most cherished claim, that her becoming 45th president of the United States would represent a feminist triumph. ‘In order to run for president of the United States, you have to spend two or three years of your life out on the road constantly asking for money and most women find that life too harsh, too draining,’ Paglia argues. ‘That is why we haven’t had a woman president in the United States — not because we haven’t been ready for one, for heaven’s sakes, for a very long time…’ Hillary hasn’t suffered — Paglia continues — because she is a woman.

May’s beard

This week, the Tory party conference ought to be gripped by the question, who the hell is Nick Timothy, the vizier with all the power? To suggest that Theresa May’s joint chief of staff is the man behind our new PM’s manoeuvres is apparently misogynistic, but I’m a woman and I’ll say what I like. May’s regime change has been riveting, yet a core mystery remains: who precisely is in charge? We endured endless TV debates before last year’s election, but the person currently running the country was not on the podium. Now he’s in a Downing Street back office, luxuriating behind his lavish beard. And it’s the beard that really mesmerises me. Nobody seems to know anything about Timothy, and he is shy of public statements.

Why Michael Gove is the leader shy Tories need

In February The Spectator's Emily Hill explained why Michael Gove was the leader the Leave campaign needed – and why he is the right leader for shy Tories. Here's her article: Lately, people only have to look at me to splurge their deepest, darkest secret. Last May, they did a terrible thing. They voted Tory. Now they’re contemplating greater deviance: voting to leave the EU — if only, they say, the campaign was fronted by someone they could believe in. And who do they want? The answer surprised me. Theresa is no temptation, as it turns out, nor even Boris. No, it’s Michael Gove they fancy. Westminster types might read this and splutter, ‘What tosh! If there’s one thing we know about the British public, it’s that they hate him.

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