Gentrification is far from our biggest problem
The late afternoon sun fell on the anomalous pine trees of Gillett Square, London N16, and on the wooden decking…
Oh brave new gender-fluid world…
Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out…
The end of brotherly love
You can never completely leave a religious cult, as this strange and touching memoir demonstrates. Patterns of thinking, turns of…
Beware the back-cracker quacks of Harley Street
All along Harley Street, charlatans and medical experts have set up side by side with no obvious way to tell…
Stop lecturing fatties – it’s really not their fault
I’ve noticed for some time now that thin people, genuinely slim ones, have a secret loathing of fatties. Kindly though…
Why is Obama so obsessed with transgender toilet rights?
Who’d have thought that one of Obama’s last great battles would be over toilets? Last week he issued a strict…
I used to back Jeremy Hunt’s digital NHS plan. Now I know it’s a disaster
My baby and I excel at blood tests. He (tiny, jaundiced) stretches out naked under the hospital’s hot cot-lamps like…
The scan said my baby wouldn’t live. It was wrong
When my unborn baby was a five-month-old fetus, twisting about in the internal dark, he was given a death sentence…
The sad decline of the teenage snog
Sometimes I sit my nieces down and treat them to tales of dating in the dark ages, before iPhones arrived…
I, robot. You, unemployed
One evening last autumn, four experts in the field of artificial intelligence arrived in Westminster with an urgent message for…
Am I a brave cult survivor, too?
When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group…
The Vicar of Baghdad: 'I've looked through the Quran trying to find forgiveness... there isn’t any.'
Exiled to Hampshire by Isis bombs, saintly Canon Andrew White itches to go back to the Middle East
Isis takes its British schoolgirl jihadis seriously. Why don’t we?
When the first schoolgirls ran away to Isis I had some sympathy for them — at least, I could see…
Is our only choice to be cynics or suckers?
It’s all the rage to mistrust the powerful these days, to say politicians are scum, or all bankers are selfish.…
The contagious madness of the new PC
Obsessive searching for hurt and offence will create it where once it never existed
‘Not to worry, just a gang killing’: the mantra of the metropolitan middle classes
Another stabbing in my new neighbourhood, not with an axe or with a samurai sword this time, but a machete.…
Are schoolgirls still fair game for teachers?
Mr Malcolm Layfield, the former violin teacher at Chetham’s music school, will have been celebrating this week after being found…
Eritrean migrants face many dangers. Are we one of them?
A few weeks ago someone very dear to me passed on a question about The Spectator, asked them by a…
In praise of the pit bull terrier
Last night I saw a woman dancing with a pit bull terrier. It was about 9 p.m. and her curtains…
Original sin makes us better people. I wish Muslims believed in it
These days, on the subject of Islam, non-Muslims have mostly divided into two camps — though there’s a little wandering…
How do bright schoolgirls fall for jihadis? The same way they fall for Justin Bieber
How could they? How could girls brought up in the wealthy West abandon their families and their own bright futures…
Do I really care about Ebola? Do you? Does Oxfam?
It’s strange how quickly we all forgot about Ebola. Speak for yourself, you might say — and I will. Until…
The real reason GPs are grumpy: the robots are coming for them
There’s something wrong with the relationship between patients and their GPs. I’ve spent much of this winter in my local…
Are old fairy stories too scary for kids?
Moving house, stacking books in boxes, I came across a clutch of fairy books, Andrew Lang’s folk tales from around…
Patriotism isn’t uncivilised - it’s what makes civilisation possible
Is it racist to be patriotic? Is patriotism, by definition, small-minded and exclusive? When you strip away the onion layers…
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