Blame game
Ah, millennials. Golden children of the Digital Age or dysfunctional, over-educated slackers? Bit of both, says Anne Helen Petersen, although…
The Queen’s Gambit
As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…
Eryn Jean Norvill
Normality is returning, bit by bit, to public entertainment.Apparently fifty thousand people can go to a football match, yelling themselves…
Aussie Life / Language
Simon Collins Things must be getting back to normal again in Australia if we’re arguing about the wording of the…
Never surrender
Yes, it was a landslide:Trump’s
Drama vs display
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
Left behind
How Labour betrayed its base
Diary
I’m often asked when I’ll write a pandemic novel. I’m not sure I’d ever be tempted, though the backdrop of…
Comfort spending
Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures…
2485: Triplets
The unclued lights (all but one either hyphened or of two words) share a distinctive feature. Across 1 Fun and…
Forbidden pairings
Put yourself in the shoes of Aryan Gholami, the teenage master from Iran who was paired with an Israeli opponent…
Pension funds need a push to invest in the green revolution
We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is…
The turf
Why hasn’t Bristol De Mai become as beloved by the racing public as his fellow greys Desert Orchid and One…
High life
New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity.…
Barometer
Gloss over Should we be worried that the head of research into respiratory drugs at AstraZeneca is called Dr Pangalos,…
The Spectator’s Notes
Last week, I wrote about ‘Frost & Lewis’ (David and Oliver), leaders of our country’s team at the Brexit negotiations,…
Ghosts of Christmas pissed
I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will…
Robust
‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of…
The public sector delusion
I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an…
Meal kits have changed my life
Ford’s Kumar Galhotra once remarked that carmaking is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision. You spend five…
Drama gold or bullion dross?
Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…
Dear Mary
Q. For many years my boss gave each member of his small team a very generous Christmas gift voucher from…
We need a dose of vaccine realism
One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts…
A shed of one’s own
I’ve moved out of my home. No, Caroline and I haven’t broken up. It’s just that we’re having the house…
Classic examples
To what use does one put history? Romans thought it provided ‘lessons’. Modern historians rather sniff at the idea, but…
