Features
The Commons touch
It’s not just the women who work at Westminster who can expect to receive unwelcome advances. I should know
Why aid fails
David Cameron’s favourite authors on what the government gets wrong about tackling poverty
America’s war on sleep
The relentless rise of ‘you snooze, you lose’
Agitprop for toddlers
The oddly strident politics of CBeebies
Florence Notebook
Florence was in fog the day I arrived. Its buildings were bathed in white cloud, its people moved as though…
Golf in the Algarve
My second tee shot soared high and straight, then hurtled down towards the lake; a repeat of my first. I…
Britain’s dirty secret
A documentary has finally exposed what life is like at the bottom. So why is the left so angry?
The return of compassionate Conservatism
‘Has the Secretary of State, like me, managed to watch programmes such as Benefits Street and On Benefits & Proud?…
All the president’s women
Hollande’s affair demonstrates that the French are becoming more puritanical about monogamy
Home truths
Did Macmillan stitch up his succession – or did Iain Macleod’s famous Spectator piece, 50 years old this week, stitch up Macmillan?
The Mandela files
His long-lost prison manuscript sheds new light on the president’s politics, smoothed over in ‘Long Walk to Freedom’
American Night
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before:…
Getting Nixon taped
Simpsons star Harry Shearer on what it takes to play the president
Snowden is no leftie
So why are British conservatives determined to ignore his revelations?
Amsterdam
‘What are people in your country saying about Holland these days?’ one Dutch friend recently asked me. I hadn’t the…
American Night
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before:…
American Night
All in the half-dark, we watch the dead playing the parts of the living, in roles we have seen before:…
The fantasy Francis
Trendy commentators have fallen in love with a pope of their own invention
Time to Go
Feeling my age, too soon too tired, Whatever gifts I had no more required, I am a hireling called in…
Notes on a scandal
I was ten when the Profumo affair began at my home, Cliveden. Andrew Lloyd Webber has captured some of the story – but not all
Ship of fools
Eco-warriors stranded in the Antarctic! It’s too good to be true
Don’t blame sugar
Obesity isn’t a matter of addiction. It’s a question of self-control
Remembering Simon Hoggart, 1946–2014
I really can’t remember exactly how I came to appoint Simon Hoggart the wine correspondent of this magazine, but I…
Fast train to friendship
I had five decades of delight with the Everly Brothers – and it all began on the Flying Scotsman
The Navigators
The 2014 winner of The Spectator’s award for unconventional travel writing
