Australia’s compulsory superannuation scheme, says Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg, is ‘a massive failure, probably the biggest failure of public policy…

The Spectator Australia has just received a leak of the latest entry in the private diary of Anthony Albanese, Prime…

What will be achieved?

Australian shareholders should stop complaining

Crisafulli gets a C minus

Tokyo’s finances are unsustainable

If the right cannot unite, they may never get a second chance

Leading the change of government to liberate Australia

Who picks up Jimbo’s tab?

Jason Arday should have been a minister in the Albanese government

Behind the ticket booth at Levens Hall, Cumbria, is an old black mulberry tree (Morus nigra) that vastly improves the…

The podium is out, what looks like a government logo fixed in the corner: we are watching the People’s Emergency…

When The Spectator asked me whether I would write an essay on ‘Why we need to strengthen the West’, I was delighted…

If Tolstoy had written about British politics, he might have noted: ‘Happy parties are all alike; every unhappy party is…

Something amazing happened as I was walking my 91-year-old mother through Ledbury: we saw a bobby on the beat. He…

What should the British government do about the Muslim Brotherhood? This question has confounded policy-makers for decades and was brought…

Are Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russia helping Kyiv win the war or strengthening the hand of Kremlin hardliners? Since early…

It’s time to put the dinner party out of its misery. Oh, and the awards dinner, dining with the cruise…

If you live near the frontiers of acceptable opinion, as any thinking person must surely do, you quickly find that…

In the musical Allegra, which has just finished its run, I ran around singing, dancing and jumping on tables for…

Home The temperature reached 38.1ºC at Kew Gardens, Surrey. In the West Midlands a wildfire at Stourbridge burnt down 19…

Physicians and the Samaritans warn against attributing suicide to a single cause. Doing so simplifies a complex tragedy. Those who…

By the 5th century bc, probably thanks to the Babylonians, enlightened Greeks were well aware that eclipses were natural phenomena.…

Universities’ challenge Sir: I have spent more than three decades in academia and so Lara Brown (‘Alma madder’, 15 August)…

If poor Jason Arday killed himself, it will be necessary to work out why. To do so, it will help…

I don’t know how familiar readers are with the term ‘accelerationism’. It is generally used to describe a tendency on…

On Tuesday, a court in Dallas, Texas will convene to decide the fate of a small baby called Gabriel or…

There can be few foreign cities where the Spectator, Times and Telegraph are more widely read than Cape Town. In…

Sometimes I wake up in the night disturbed by dreams of James Bond. Surely, you might say, that’s the point…

Adura, a new name to most of us, turns out to be a joint venture between Shell and the Norwegian…

The Numidian prince, raised in Julius Caesar’s household, remains a shadowy figure, but we get some good stories about his contemporaries, including Pliny the Elder and the Emperor Caligula

Drawing on the real-life story of Hermine Braunsteiner, a former Ravensbrück camp guard, Hampshire convincingly demonstrates how apparently harmless people can become brutal murderers

In a commodified world that now seems inescapable we score each other on dating apps as casually as we might a vacuum cleaner or a takeaway

Carlos the Jackal, responsible for shooting mainly unarmed people point-blank, will live comfortably in a French prison for the rest of his days – a celebrity to inmates and visitors

The Roman general’s inner life is a blank, as Harris admits – but filling it with memories of military campaigns and aqueduct-building doesn’t make for the liveliest story

The tragic story of Ruth Ellis, hanged in 1955 for murdering her abusive lover, is retold in gripping fictional form

The gifted pianist, photographer and art collector had an extraordinary love of the contemporary, and this account of her friendship with David Hockney is deeply moving

Ranging from Sudan to Azerbaijan, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s balanced account provides us with the necessary background to form our own views of what’s happening in the region

Philip Hensher reminds us of the transformative power of fiction over the centuries – from Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic experiments to Zadie Smith’s bone-deep knowledge of the form

It’s more than 75 years since Lee J. Cobb opened in Elia Kazan’s production of Death of a Salesman and…

Birds do not sing. They bleep and rattle and buzz like a dial-up modem. That we consider what comes out…

Pity Carl Maria von Weber. On the morning of 5 June 1826 a servant knocked on the door of his…

We first saw Sybylla, the heroine (in every sense) of My Brilliant Career, at a society gathering in 1900 Australia…

The film & Sons, in which a patriarch summons his estranged sons to let them in on a secret, has…

There comes a point in most bands’ lives at which their appeal has become too selective for them to sell…

Attention spans at Edinburgh are brief. With thousands of shows on offer, the punters have to make a split-second decision…

Style, self-evidently among those who pursue an interest in such affairs, is, according to the Comte de Buffon, the man…

The Australian War Memorial Council, under Chairman Kim Beazley, is proposing to include extensive coverage, in its new Pre-1914 Gallery,…

The late, great Rod Liddle in one of his classic columns fulminated against what he called the most ‘irritating words’.…

Dante’s Beach, Ravenna When Machiavelli was tortured, then banished from Florence in 1513 to his modest farm in the Tuscan…

Salade Lyonnaise is often translated as ‘bacon and egg salad’ and I can’t stand it. Not because it’s inaccurate –…

I don’t want you getting the impression that I fritter away my life on a golf course, but when I…

Over the weekend, although I hope that I was not committing blasphemy, it occurred to me that two splendid festivals…

Q. We have a granddaughter, aged 21, living in our basement. We see a lot of her and her boyfriend.…

Should I regret writing a satirical piece for this magazine about Jason Arday? Yes, according to those who blame the…

Britain’s latest Charioteer of Fire has no need for grandad vests or a Vangelis earworm, just a smile as dazzling…

As seen in the New Statesman I t’s a quarter to midnight on a hot July evening when the text…

The Germans stampeded into the house, overwhelming me with the element of surprise. ‘Incoming!’ I shouted through the main staircase…

This is not happening, I thought, as I jabbed at my phone to magic up a hybrid to convey me…

For Competition 3463 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem in the style of a well-known poet, the first…