Musical misfits
How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…
Diary
The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of…
Foreign corners that are forever England
Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…
Barometer
An idea past its sell-by date Waitrose has announced the removal of ‘best before’ dates from many food products. –…
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Portrait of the week
Home BP reported quarterly profits of £6.9 billion, its biggest for 14 years, after oil and gas prices rose steeply.…
Nasser and the Nazis
Justin Marozzi finds Egypt teeming with Germans after the second world war
Harping on the past
It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…
The authentic Church is not Woke
Woke: A collectivist mindset that requires absolute, unquestioning obedience to the current thing, to display that you are a good…
Rishi Sunak is not stealing from the poor to give to the rich
Until this morning this had been Rishi Sunak’s week. While Liz Truss found herself trying to talk her way out…
A second-hand private jet? How dare!
Another day, another shortage. Could anything be worse than living through the dreaded toilet paper wars or the more recent…
Viktor Orbán’s Texas rodeo
Say what you want about Viktor Orbán, but he gives a good speech. His address on Thursday in Dallas on…
Bring on the housing crash!
It has been a long time coming, given that shares and bonds have been falling for most of the year,…
Will the Bank of England say sorry?
Months ago I said the Bank of England would face a barrage of criticism and a challenge to its independence…
Is Putin using a body double?
Ever since his invasion of Ukraine in February, the world’s media has been awash with rumours that Vladimir Putin is…
Who is Sandi Toksvig to lecture Justin Welby about sin?
Has Justin Welby met his match in Sandi Toksvig? The entertainer has sent an open letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury,…
Don’t grass on your neighbour if they break the hosepipe ban
There’s nothing worse than a grass. Or so goes the wisdom expressed in soap operas like EastEnders. Of course, there…
Trump’s ‘Fox ban’ wishful thinking by Democrats
In the most outrageous piece of transference bias, the left-liberal New York Times reported that Fox News had not invited Donald…
Life after liberalism
Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of…
Sydney to host World Pride 2023 during a Monkey pox emergency
Hullo, hullo! Are there any investigative journalists left in Sydney? When there was a Covid surge in India last April,…
Fascism pretending to be manners
Notoriously, the very brief tenure as Liberal Party leader of Alexander Downer came to a shuddering halt in January 1995…
What is the true purpose of ‘The Voice’?
There are two elements to this proposed Voice referendum. The Voice itself and its inclusion in the Constitution. The latter…
Sunak and Truss’s Q&A with Sky – the reaction
Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss were quizzed by Sky News’s Kay Burley and undecided Tory members this evening, with Truss the…
Empty Space: Silicon Valley’s war against victims
The third world is full of silent victims. Impoverished nations ruled by dictators, or those left to fend for themselves…
Let’s ban the metaverse and colonize space
The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What…
