The Week
The price of seeing Santa (and what it gets you)
Dear Santas A £22.50 a head Christmas theme park in Warwickshire designed by Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen closed temporarily for improvements after…
Nicky Morgan vs Socrates
After the Philae space-lab’s triumph, one can see why Education Secretary Nicky Morgan should have hymned the ‘Stem’ subjects (science, technology, engineering…
From the archives
From ‘Sedition in Ireland’, The Spectator, 28 November 1914: If the press is to be muzzled, why do not the…
Australian Letters
Creative writing Sir: When Geoffrey Robertson gets it wrong he is calamitous. He ends his Diary note defending ‘a young…
Spare us a Bob?
Anyone listening to the BBC this week could be forgiven for thinking that the musician Bob Geldof had just emerged…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said: ‘Red warning lights are once again flashing on the dashboard of the global…
Richard Madeley’s diary: Forgetting Tom Conti’s name, and other harrowing experiences
Oh God, it’s happened again. Another evening where I’m surrounded by people I know personally or have interviewed, and I…
Actually, Bob, they do know it’s Christmas (we checked)
Yeah, Bob, they know The answer to the rhetorical question posed by the Band Aid single, ‘Do they know it’s…
Aristophanes on Mazher Mahmood
Undercover journalist Mazher Mahmood, otherwise known as the Fake Sheikh, has been accused of dodgy dealing in luring the innocent…
From the archives
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 21 November 1914: We are glad to learn that the laudable persistence of…
Spectator letters: Why we should subsidise weddings
Let’s subsidise weddings Sir: Fraser Nelson (‘Marrying money’, 15 November) points out that marriages tend to last longer than cohabitations and…
Thank heavens for Justin Welby!
For decades, interventions of the Archbishop of Canterbury in national debate were like a sporadic bombardment of small pebbles against…
Portrait of the week
Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote…
Alexander Masters’s diary: The idea that could unlock dozens of new cancer drugs
Two million pounds can buy you consideration for a place on a medical trial! Every year untold numbers of potential…
Fort Lauderdale’s law against feeding the homeless still isn’t America’s dumbest
States of criminality A 90-year-old Florida man feeding the homeless was arrested under a Fort Lauderdale law which makes it…
The lesson of Athens: to make people care about politics, give them real power
Voters explain their apathy about politics on the grounds that the politicians do not understand them. No surprise there, an…
From the archives
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 14 November 1914: We must make no attempt to conceal the terrible character…
Spectator letters: Richard Ingrams defends Joan Littlewood, and the truth about Napoleon’s poisonous wallpaper
The state of Italy… Sir: Ambassador Terracciano’s letter (Letters, 1 November) about Nicholas Farrell’s article (‘The dying man of Europe’,…
Say no to devolution without democracy
Imagine if, in one of her first acts as First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon announced that, in spite of…
Portrait of the week
Home Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned as the head of an inquiry into historical child sex abuse…
Barry Humphries’s diary: The bookshop ruined by Harry Potter
Do fish have loins? Last Tuesday, in a pretentious restaurant, I ordered a ‘loin of sea trout’. It looked just…
You can still book your flight to Mars
Space to dream Richard Branson’s dream of commercial space flights has suffered a setback after a prototype craft crashed. But…
No, Richard Branson, our greatest achievements don’t come from our greatest pain
Explaining the death of a pilot testing a Virgin Galactic rocket-ship, Sir Richard Branson intoned: ‘I truly believe that humanity’s…
From the archives
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 7 November 1914: On Wednesday next the King will open Parliament in state,…
Australian Letters
Well-meaning Whitlam Sir: Over recent months we have been subjected to an unprecedented amount of vainglory from the ALP and…
