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The Spectator

1 April 2023 Aus

Raging BS

Lightweight Libs threw in the towel

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Climate wars rekindled

So, apparently the climate wars aren’t over quite yet. Thank goodness for that! That’s not us rekindling the battle, by…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

I feel obliged to bring to the notice of those who do not live in Victoria that at least in…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Raging BS

Lightweight Libs threw in the towel

Features Australia

Six minefields that could sink SSN-Aukus

Politics-boom! Dollars-boom! Technology-boom!....

Features Australia

Don’t go chasing the doctors’ wives

Conservatives can never win by aping the Teals

Features Australia

Stirrings of Euro eco-rebellion

Europe’s Green car wars and what they mean for us

Features Australia

Diagnosing Gaia

Time to treat Mother Earth like we would any other elderly patient

Features Australia

Covid’s solar sacrifices

Where are Franciscan missionaries when you need them?

Features

Notes on...

Sleeper trains

It’s a fabulous combination: travelling by train and sleeping. And the good news is that the concept of sleeper trains…

Features, New Zealand

Letter from down under

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up.…

Features

‘My country is a proxy of the Russian state’

Georgia’s exiled former defence minister on Putin, poisonings and EU membership

Features

Not safe for work

Getting a job after 50 is easier said than done

Features

Local heroes

The joy of an old man pub

Features

Downtowns

The death of the American city

Features

Island myths

The new Attenborough series needs challenging

The Week

Leading article

Mistaken identity

The World Athletics Council has taken the decisive step of announcing that transgender women who underwent male puberty before their…

Letters

Letters

Care of children Sir: At last people, namely Harriet Sergeant (‘The ghost children’, 25 March) and Rod Liddle (‘Childcare: an…

Columnists

Columns

The Union’s best hope

After the narrow victory of the Brexit campaign in 2016, it was often said that the result would lead to…

Columns

The rule of lawyers

Have you had your fourth Covid booster jab yet? They are being very quiet about it these days. I used…

Columns

Beware the AI voice thieves

After years of blissful indifference, finally I’m scared of AI. I’ve been complacent, slept soundly beside my husband as he…

Columns

Our poor deluded MPs

They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life. But I would add a couple more things…

Books

Australian Books

Writing about leaders

Historian Chris Wallace, who currently holds a professorship at the Faculty of Business, Government and Law at the University of…

More from Books

Family friction

In the wake of their father’s death, a brother and sister recall the violent domestic dramas of their childhood

More from Books

Secrets and lies

A merciless ETA terrorist is in hiding in Spain – but which of three seemingly innocent women is she?

More from Books

After the fall

Timothy Garton Ash weighs the consequences of the push towards a single currency, the West’s dependence for energy on Russia, and Brexit, among much else

More from Books

A Faustian bargain

Under the much-vaunted new secularism, Muslims were treated as second-class citizens at best - and were often the victims of mass pogroms

More from Books

Driven to distraction

The buzz of modernity has plagued us since the Industrial Revolution – but even Thoreau tired of practising his ‘habit of attention’ at Walden Pond

More from Books

Together and apart

Death permeates these stories, as Nell – a stand-in for Atwood – mourns the loss of her beloved partner Tig

More from Books

A surreal account of lockdown

A complex novel explores the ways we try to understand a world that isn’t good or fair or causal or even comprehensible

More from Books

Performing zeal

If opera is acting, concealing the self behind a character, where does that leave the singer in the concert hall, caught between ventriloquist and dummy, wonders Ian Bostridge

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Crowning achievements

From the mass panic of William the Conqueror’s to the drunken mayhem of Victoria’s, few coronations have passed off entirely peacefully

More from Books

No happy endings

Traditional fairy tales are transposed to a modern setting and given a thrilling – often terrifying – twist

Lead book review

A new world order

Zones of exception, freed from ordinary forms of regulation, are proliferating in bewildering varieties. Kwasi Kwarteng considers the consequences for democracy

Arts

Australian Arts

Searching in vain for The African Queen

What a weird world we inhabit when it comes to popular culture or indeed to any culture high or low.…

Television

If I were a rich man

I have a theory that many great artists’ strength is a product of their weakness. The flaw of the relentlessly…

Pop

Less than the sum of their parts

Recently in these pages, ruminating on the ghastly Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I wrote that music does not…

Radio

Whisky and cordite

Most of us are familiar with the notion of writer’s block, that paralysis of invention induced by the appalling sight…

Cinema

Mummy’s curse

There are some films that you know will be quality simply by the actors who have agreed to be in…

Theatre

Divine comedy

Accidental Death of an Anarchist has been performed all over the world with varying degrees of success. Written by Dario…

Opera

They’re creepy and they’re kooky

English National Opera has arrived at the Dead City, and who, before Christmas, would have given odds that this new…

Exhibitions

Dotty and daffy

Getting the words ‘impressionism’ and ‘modern art’ into one exhibition title is a stroke of marketing genius on the part…

Arts feature

Talking dirty

Christine L. Corton on how fog gripped the Victorian imagination

Life

Kiwi Life

Kiwi life

Climate catastrophe? Follow the money Because of the importance of the claim that CO2 has the potential to cause considerable…

Kiwi Life

Language

Australian journalist Miranda Devine (currently working on the New York Post) has drawn our attention to a new word ‘totting’.…

Food

Express joy

Darjeeling Express lives at the top of Kingly Court, just off Carnaby Street, which was once the world-famous embodiment of…

Competition

Speaker’s corner

In Competition No. 3292, you were invited  to provide a poem to mark the death of Betty Boothroyd. The formidable…

Spectator sport

Sharron Davies’s great victory

It’s been quite a while since we celebrated any of Sharron Davies’s considerable achievements in the pool – well, a…

No sacred cows

There’s no bargaining with my wife

For me, one of the joys of going abroad is bargaining with the local sellers. They name an extortionate price;…

More from life

Bring back the savoury!

For a while now, we’ve been living through a renaissance of classical British cooking: a whole host of restaurants have…

Real life

Real life

The pony grabbed the bag of carrots and ran across the field with it in her mouth, tail in the…

Low life

Low life

The morning after we were wedded, I went to hospital in Marseille. The oncologist wanted to assess the pain level…