‘You can sell your soul for a can of soya beans,’ announced the second most powerful man in the world…

When I filed my first Spectator piece the Aussie edition was still a twinkle in the eye of the then…

The trouble with a double-X rating Having worked across several professions, started and run four successful businesses and having a…

It was the claim of one of my past editors – Jenny Naipaul – during my 11 years of writing…

Exactly twenty-five years ago, August 1994, Australia’s leading practitioner of late-term abortion gave a lecture at Monash University on ‘Abortion…

When Prince Harry revealed, in the issue of Vogue his wife guest-edited, that they would only have two children ‘to…

So here we go again. What I will call ‘Atsic mark II’ is currently getting pollies, journos and lawyers in…

Australia’s constitutional system cannot function properly with a Governor-General inserting himself into contemporary political debate. If the current Governor-General wishes…

Australians love Netflix. If statistics are to be believed, roughly half of all Australians have a Netflix subscriber in their…

The great Groucho Marx once joked that he didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as…

The adoption of an abortion law so extreme it sanctions the killing of any innocent who dares survive has been…

The epiphany came when I was standing in the oxymoron of a speedy boarding queue at Gatwick, waiting to have…

The real secret behind Margate’s revival isn’t so much the restored Dreamland amusement park, but the trains. A decade ago,…

Tom HollandTrevone, Cornwall   Pretty much every summer, my family and my cousins head for a farm in north Cornwall,…

It would be daft for someone to offer you £1.8 billion and you turn it down. That sort of money…

There’s a cultural problem at the BBC, isn’t there? The Corporation is trying to attract under-35s — the sort who…

There is no faster way to get yourself classed as dim than by admitting that you hold religious belief, especially…

‘Volcanic temper… suspicious of everyone… irritability, mood swings… terror stalking the shadows… devastating collapse of Europe’s economy… rampant insecurity, unbridled…

Savannah GA is supposed to have lots of ghosts, but I’d forgotten that. It was an April morning and sunlight…

Comments by the former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers this week, claiming that Britain will come off poorly in negotiations…

Home If the government lost a confidence motion when parliament sits again in September, it could call an election for…

It is rare that losing a day at Lord’s for a Test match is welcome. I had expected to be…

Dams, lives and statistics The town of Whaley Bridge, Derbyshire, was evacuated after heavy rainfall caused the partial collapse of…

It is said that our political system is ‘broken’ simply because the passions aroused by Brexit have effectively created a…

We don’t cut God Sir: The Revd Dr Peter Mullen suggests (Letters, 3 August) that Boris Johnson told him my…

Who wrote ‘Our lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country … creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations…

The United Kingdom is a country governed, in large part, by convention —but in the heat of the Brexit debate,…

Though autumn is happily still some way off, we’ve already reached that stage in the shepherd’s calendar when full-grown lambs…

On that record-breaking, sweltering day at the end of July, my three-year-old son did a pirouette in the paddling pool…

A wave to the FT team whose weekend feature on how the pound has been hit by fears of no…

It is not often that a book’s blurb gives any idea of what’s inside, but Helen Castor’s endorsement — ‘a…

On a rainy day in 1955, four-year-old Raja Shehadeh left school without putting his coat on. ‘I will soon be…

Is there a more perfect children’s writer for this generation than Judith Kerr? She started with a tiger — The…

No matter how exquisitely English —gobbets of blood amid the fireplace ornaments — murder annihilates meaning. Even when the motive…

Francis Pryor claims he would be a rich man if every person who told him that the Fens were ‘flat…

The epigraph of Three Women comes from Baudelaire’s ‘Windows’: ‘What one can see out in the sunlight is always less…

It lives in me still, the intense thrill when, as a child, I would listen to the Irish people around…

Mary Ann Caws, a retired professor of English and French literature at the City University of New York, published her…

Yoko Ogawa’s new novel takes us to a Japanese island where things keep disappearing: ribbons, birds, musical instruments, fruit. People,…

Now, how shall I start this review? I loved this book. I really did. (Too abrupt.) I loved this book,…

The locals probably can’t bear the Edinburgh festival. Their solid, handsome streets are suddenly packed with needy thesps waving and…

Stepping into any art gallery, the last thing you expect to be greeted by is a cacophony of barking and…

It’s togas-a-go-go as the Bolshoi bring Yuri Grigorovich’s 1956 ballet Spartacus to the Royal Opera House. Oh dear, I did…

Maybe the equality inspectors at the corporation didn’t get the chance to vet Richard Littlejohn’s series for Radio 2, The…

When it comes to the opening of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Mark Twain probably put it as well as anyone: ‘Out…

Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent,…

Once upon a time two men sat in a New York bar lamenting the state of Broadway. So they decided…

Grade: B- So a queen dies as her giant baby is being born. The baby grows very big indeed and…

Houston is a prosperous Texan city, the hub of the US oil and gas industries. And home to the city’s…

Athens I am struggling up the slippery marble steps of the Acropolis with the Geldofs and the Bismarcks. We gaze…

My luck had to run out one of these fine days. Everybody’s does sooner or later. I’ve had a fantastic…

The travellers were blamed for fly-tipping when all that was left on the common after they went back up north…

‘Table presence’ is a funny old expression. It sounds as though it refers to a player’s magnetic appeal or domineering…

Mickey Adams won the British Championship, which finished last week in Torquay, for the seventh time. Leading scores (out of…

White to play. This position is a variation from Adams-Pigott, Torquay 2019. How can White crash through to gain a…

In Competition No. 3110 you were invited to provide a version of the hokey-cokey filtered through the pen of a…

Four unclued lights are thematic and are defined by two others. They are found in The 21 and 2 (also the…

The unclued lights are LAND OF (25A): MILK AND HONEY (11A), CAKES (12A), HOPE AND GLORY (39A), ENCHANTMENT (7D), MY…

The BBC’s flagship news and current affairs programme wasn’t in any doubt about who to blame for America’s latest bout…

During the World Cup (remember that?), Virat Kohli, the very model of a modern major cricketer, appealed to Indian fans…

Q. A friend constantly walks around with his bootlaces undone. His wife declines to nag him on the grounds she…

The Pirate Bar is an oddity, even for this column: a bar and restaurant themed in homage to a pirate,…

When Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’, I was willing to believe that the word gloomster…