Freeze out the bedwetters
The next federal election is a shoo-in for the Coalition. This statement may appear counter-intuitive, but is nonetheless true. The…
Batteries fail to spark
Elon Musk is such a good salesman that, despite formidable and blindingly obvious problems, he has managed to convince everyone…
Ideological evasion
Malcolm Turnbull’s speech to London think tank Policy Exchange on 11 July provided an insight into his government’s ideology, and…
Tony, Donald and the X Factor
Ernst Bertram’s study Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie was published in 1918, but its first English translation, under the subtitle Attempt…
Business/Robbery etc
July is a wonderful month, blessed by federal parliament not sitting and so temporarily depriving the Turnbull government of opportunities…
Economical with… free speech
The Spycatcher trial established Malcolm Turnbull’s reputation at the time as a brilliant champion of free speech. Personally, reviewing a…
Rape culture frenzy
The knives are out and sights set on a mighty big scalp. Moves are afoot to fell St Paul’s College,…
Tim’s anti-White Australia Policy
Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane’s latest push to embed grievance-mongering identity politics at the heart of the nation’s institutions threatens…
Bob Carr has no shame
Does he have no sense of shame? Is there nothing he won’t do to defame Israel, or the local Jewish…
Grace Cossington Smith, The bridge in building 1929
The viewer could treat this exhibition as an exercise in ‘compare and contrast’, or follow my preference and simply enjoy…
Nadine Garner
Three women who shared a flat as university freshers in 1983 and have maintained their friendship through the years are…
Alan Moorehead
He left Melbourne in 1936 to become a famous writer, and he did. Not just a famous writer but a…
Tom Roberts The sculptor’s studio 1884-85
We may have seen them before, but the prospect of the Australian Impressionism show is very alluring; it has now…
Low life
Valencia was a furnace. During the short ride from the airport, the taxi driver supplemented his chat about the weather…
Real life
Two months after I cancelled Sky, a strange letter arrived in the post. ‘We are writing to you because we…
Rog apart, Wimbledon 2017 was a disgrace
For obvious reasons this column always welcomes ‘King Roger Rules The World’ headlines on the back pages. And the front…
Winter is nearly here – bring on the body count
As a Game of Thrones fan, I feel ambivalent about the fact that the saga is finally wending its way…
The turf
A woman I once encountered at the dining table whose prime years were clearly behind her described herself as ‘approaching…
Playing Stalin for laughs
Christopher Wilson’s new novel is much easier to enjoy than to categorise. And ‘enjoy’ is definitely the right word, even…
The new age of the refugee
After years of estrangement in a foreign land, what can immigrants expect to find on their return home? The remembered…
By Patten or design?
My old friend Richard Ingrams was said always to write The Spectator’s television reviews sitting in the next-door room to…
Something in the water
‘It was a shock, and an epiphany,’ says Fiona Sampson, to realise that many of her favourite places were built…
The infamous four
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy…
The cold grip of fear
A screenwriter sits in a lovely rented house somewhere up an Alp in early December. The air is clear, the…
A choice of short stories
It can’t be easy to switch between editing others people’s fiction and writing your own: how do you suspend that…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Beyond the pale
You can tell everything you need to know about what Victoria Lomasko thinks of her homeland by the titles of…
Voices of exile
During the military dictatorships of the 1970s, exile for many Latin American writers was not so much a state of…
China syndrome
Every day on his way to work at Harvard, Professor Allison wondered how the reconstruction of the bridge over Boston’s…
Self’s obsessions
This 600-page, single-paragraph novel shuttles back and forth across time between the perspectives of an elderly and confused psychiatrist, a…