The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews.

Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online.

Alongside that, you get a 20-pound John Lewis or Waitrose Voucher.

Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.

Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud.

Each week we choose some of our favorite articles from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Petra Gibbons and on this week's podcast,

Max Jeffrey reports on the hunt for Cambridge's

bike bandit and he tracks the thief down. Following the news that actress Sydney Sweeney is selling

her bathwater, Tanya Gold says it's an easy way to exploit a sad male fetish. Madeline Grant,

the spectator's new assistant editor, examines the decline of period dramas. Matthew Paris looks at what history doesn't tell us,

saying that the meaning we give to an era relies on as much as what we choose to discard as what we

decide to notice. And finally, Calvin Poe visits a new gallery, the VNA East Storehouse in London's

Queen Elizabeth Park. Up first, Max Jeffrey.

The Cambridge Bike Bandit emerged.

I watched the rough, smiling face of the old man who came slowly from his bungalow and urged me to join him around the back.

He didn't look like a thief.

We entered his grassless yard filled with bikes, tyres and tools.

This rally, 80 pounds, he said, withdrawing a creaky frame from the pile.

I just changed the tyre, you see? Not heavy. Made in England. Nottingham. You can try a little bit.

Try it for ten minutes. I don't mind. A saucer told me about the bandit, a man who openly shifted stolen bikes from a suburban Cambridge home, so bad and unpoliced has bike theft become in the city.

I had got the outlaw's phone number and arranged to meet him under the guise of making a purchase.

...