Conservatives and cojones
Peter Dutton must make the ‘right’ choice
Weaponising words
The Left is winning the language wars
Courting disaster
Overturning Roe will embolden progresssive judges
Neighbours no more
It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…
Aussie life
New US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy had them at her first media conference interjection: when the white, stale male journalist (the…
Language
It was Will Self (writing in The Speccie) who drew my attention to the new word ‘uberise.’ He says he…
The politicians’ republic
Behind the push for change is a power grab
Gender heretic in church of crazy
There’s a high price to pay for defying trans dictates
All that jazz
Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s.…
National cycle routes
Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own…
Keep on truckin’
Sam Kriss on why country-pop is the most modern music there is
Old news, but good news
When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of…
A sharp instant in nature
‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…
Power struggles
During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy.…
Spare us the preaching
It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…
Portrait of the week
Home In a television debate between the two contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party (and hence the prime…
Black Midi: Hellfire
Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them,…
My lunch with Liz
Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…
Diary
Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as…
Shame the inflation price-rise opportunists
The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation…
Clangers and colanders
Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely…
Running to keep up
Why Sunak suddenly finds himself facing defeat
Letters
Get fracking Sir: All credit to The Spectator for grabbing the cancelled Tory leadership debate slot (‘The final three’, 23…
Flageons
‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy…
The new PM’s growing to-do list
In theory, the Conservative leadership contest could have stretched to the autumn, but the 1922 Committee and CCHQ decided to…
