The Week
The Kitchener effect
From ‘Lord Kitchener’, The Spectator, 9 June 1916: The central fact in Kitchener’s administration of the War Office is that…
Australian letters
LGBT etc Sir: I was offended and humiliated by Simon Collins (4 June 2016) omission of my sexuality identification tag.…
Letters
War and Brexit Sir: Over the past few weeks every underemployed academic, hack or backbencher has come forward offering opinions…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, caused mild surprise by cancelling a cabinet meeting and hastily convening a press conference…
Diary
When an old friend X came to dinner in London, I sampled what it must have been like during the…
Continental drift
It is a long time since the term ‘sick man of Europe’ could be applied to Britain. France is now…
Portrait of the week
Home Two British men were charged with immigration offences after the rescue by night of 18 Albanian migrants, two of…
Diary
In 1873, when Jules Verne published his Around the World in Eighty Days, it seemed worth betting that a circumnavigation…
Barometer
Gorilla warfare Harambe, a 17-year-old gorilla, was shot at Cincinnati Zoo after he started dragging away a boy aged four…
Aristotle vs the civil service
The civil service is to be allowed to find out what job applicants’ ‘socio-economic background’ is. What abject drivel is…
Against armistice
From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we…
Australian letters
A Del Con writes… Sir, your leading article of 28 May 2016 sets out the terrible choice we face on…
Continental drift
It is a long time since the term ‘sick man of Europe’ could be applied to Britain. France is now…
Aristotle vs the civil service
The civil service is to be allowed to find out what job applicants’ ‘socio-economic background’ is. What abject drivel is…
Barometer
Gorilla warfare Harambe, a 17-year-old gorilla, was shot at Cincinnati Zoo after he started dragging away a boy aged four…
Diary
In 1873, when Jules Verne published his Around the World in Eighty Days, it seemed worth betting that a circumnavigation…
Against armistice
From ‘President Wilson and the Lessons of History’, 2 June 1916: Emphatically it is not a war of what we…
Letters
Cameron’s bluster Sir: Peter Oborne is surely right that lying and cheating are now commonplace in the heart of government…
Portrait of the week
Home Two British men were charged with immigration offences after the rescue by night of 18 Albanian migrants, two of…
Losing faith
A landmark in national life has just been passed. For the first time in recorded history, those declaring themselves to…
Portrait of the week
Home The government published a Treasury analysis warning that an exit from the EU would plunge Britain into a year-long…
Diary
Why do we assume all doctors are good? We don’t think there are no bad cooks or bad plumbers. But…
Barometer
A man in full A relic said to contain a fragment of St Thomas à Becket’s elbow arrived from Hungary for…
Plutarch and the EU
Boris Johnson argues that the current European Union is yet another failed attempt to replicate the golden age of a…
The dogs of peace
From ‘Food dictatorship’, The Spectator, 27 May 1916: Nobody would like to see the whole race of dogs exterminated, but…
