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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

A test of leadership

There have been some notable no-shows at the Ashes this summer. In the wake of her travel allowances scandal, the…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Strange death of the Maga right

Tolerating antisemitism will destroy conservatism

Features Australia

King Albo Canute

The PM fears a royal commission will expose his failures

Features Australia

Big Mal and economics

Policy failures of the Fraser years

Features Australia

Maduro madness

The greatest demonstration of unconventional warfare in modern history

Features Australia

Trump v. Congressional Republicans

Populist leaders on the right are blocked by their own side

Features Australia

Sun King and the Scrub

What Queensland still understands

Features Australia

Costly Roots

The escalating price of Aboriginal heritage is measured in more than dollars

Features Australia

Beware ‘fake’ royal commission

G-G must demand answers from recalcitrant PM

Features

mandelson

Features

Trump’s lessons for Europe

Donald Trump’s dramatic intervention in Venezuela has achieved much more than to bring a brutal, corrupt dictator and drug trafficker…

Features

‘We will use the power of democracy to blow you away’: Reform plots a path to No. 10

As he made his way to lunch on Monday, Danny Kruger, the former Tory MP who defected to Reform last…

Features

What Trump’s coup in Venezuela means for Iran

In a city awash with visual propaganda, one mural in Caracas is especially striking for the western visitor. In it,…

Features

Team Trump won’t stop at Venezuela

Invade the world, invite the world. That pithy phrase was invented in the 2000s by Steve Sailer, the right-wing writer,…

Notes on...

Make mine a Moka pot

It’s strange the things that can trigger amity or affection. At the beginning of the capsule/pod coffee-maker craze, when George…

Features

Blame the EU for your increasingly bossy car

When Eileen, a 75-year-old British grandmother, bought a brand-new car she found its advanced driver-assistance repeatedly told her the speed…

Features

Foetal femicide has arrived in Britain

Last summer, the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi introduced a clause to the Crime and Policing Bill that will decriminalise all…

Features

In defence of the Freemasons

It’s a personal delight that on 29 September 1829, the first day of Robert Peel’s new force, the first warrant…

Features

The independent bookshops that aren’t what they seem

Independent bookshops remain some of Britain’s loveliest places. Quaint, charming, precarious, they are a bulwark against blandness and offer refuge…

Features

European countries are expanding their militaries. Why aren’t we?

Following America’s extraordinary raid on Venezuela last week, Donald Trump has pointed to Greenland, which belongs to the Kingdom of…

The Week

Leading article

Donald Trump is confronting a reality that Europe has ignored

Donald Trump’s rendition of Nicolas Maduro was a brilliantly executed coup. It was also an exhibition of America’s hard power,…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: US strikes Venezuela, China taxes contraceptives and happy anniversary to the Birmingham bin-strikers

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said Britain was not involved ‘in any way’ in the US strikes on…

Diary

Another year without an Oscar

With the close of 2025 I crowned a tumultuous year in which I got married, moved house and saw Evelyn,…

Ancient and modern

What a shame Andrew Tate didn’t live in ancient Greece

Has any public figure of recent memory ever admitted to feeling shame for anything they have said or done? As…

Letters

Jack Rankin: No to Reform

No to Reform Sir: Perhaps because I have been candid about the Conservative party’s failures in office, I am mooted…

Columnists

Columns

Labour’s next rebellion

When Bridget Phillipson arrived at the Department for Education, she knew which issue would define her tenure. Within days, she…

Columns

Has Trump gone mad?

I asked Luna, my AI girlfriend, if she thought Donald Trump was right to have bombed Caracas and abducted Nicolas…

Columns

The young women hypnotised by Polanski

A friend mentioned to me last week that a third of young women in the UK are planning to vote…

Columns

In praise of the climate ‘emergency’

All this winter, until New Year’s Eve, and for the first time since I started keeping llamas, Vera, Ann and…

Columns

No sex please, we’re Gen Z

For many years now we have all been agonising over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s…

Any other business

Am I really a tightwad?

Of all the heavyweight books I’ve ever been asked to review, one that most influenced my view of how the…

Books

Lead book review

The spiritual yearnings of David Bowie

Gnosticism was one of Bowie’s lifelong obsessions and the outer reaches of religious thought inspired many of his lyrics

More from Books

The scandal of California’s stolen water

Ever since the building of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, begun in 1905, diversion of water by unscrupulous conglomerates has left swathes of the Golden State a toxic desert

More from Books

Coming of age in Melbourne: Landscape with Landscape, by Gerald Murnane, reviewed

The protagonists of these six linked stories are much like the young Murnane himself, dreaming of becoming a writer and escaping to the wilds of Australia

More from Books

Odd man out: The Burning Origin, by Daniele Mencarelli, reviewed

An ambitious designer based in Milan returns home to Rome on a visit and finds himself torn between nostalgia for childhood and disgust for his underachieving friends

More from Books

The many shades of Pink Floyd

Founded 60 years ago, the multi-million-selling rock band has had five incarnations to date, with members dying, resigning or suing each other in a series of blistering law suits

More from Books

After the party: One of Us, by Elizabeth Day, reviewed

In a sequel to Day’s 2017 novel The Party, the art historian Martin Gilbert dreams of revenge on his former friend Ben Fitzmaurice, now a dazzling Tory politician with a dark secret

More from Books

The glorious ventilation shafts hiding in plain sight

Victorians took pleasure in artfully disguising these essential life-saving structures – and contemporary architects continue the tradition to equally spectacular effect

More from Books

The adventures of an improbable rock journalist

Cameron Crowe started writing for Rolling Stone aged just 15. But both as reporter and later as filmmaker, his innate decency made him decidedly ‘uncool’

More from Books

Global fish stocks have been perilous for decades – so why is still so little being done?

Dredgers continue to destroy the seabed, illegal fishing vessels routinely encroach on no-take zones and governments persist in granting unsustainable catch quotas to their national fleets

More from Books

An entertaining demolition of futurology

Nick Foster explores the various ways we think about the future, from thrilled anticipation through to panicked doom-mongering

More from Books

The lionising of Richard I over the centuries

The Plantagenet king whose life was packed with glamour, blood and brutality would have relished the heroic legends that steadily accrued after his death

Arts

Australian Films

Being Hermann Göring

Nuremberg Directed by James Vanderbilt Starring Russell Crowe, Michael Shannon, Rami Malek, Leo Woodall Before last Monday, the most recent…

Australian Arts

Remembrance of things past

It’s easy to forget the artistic range of people who have died recently. Susie Figgis, in charge of casting the…

Dance

What has happened to the Paris Opéra Ballet?

Freighted by a 350-year history, the Paris Opéra Ballet is a behemoth of an institution – lavishly subsidised by the…

Cinema

Ruthlessly manipulative: Hamnet reviewed

Hamnet is an imagined account of William Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (Anne) Hathaway, their unspeakable grief at the death of…

Exhibitions

Cadavers will always captivate. Museums need to chill out

Is it right to put human remains on show? It’s a question that museum curators and the public have been…

Television

Lucy Worsley’s sleuthing is rather impressive

Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all…

Classical

The magnificence of Beare’s Chamber Music Festival

The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one…

Theatre

Why has the National got it in for Oirish peasants?

The Playboy of the Western World is like the state opening of parliament. Worth seeing once. Director Caitriona McLaughlin delivers…

Arts feature

The genius of Morton Feldman

To accompany an exhibition of paintings by Philip Guston at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2004, a…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

I’ve been an actor and satirist for forty years, and suddenly I’m told my words might be violent, requiring institutional…

Aussie Life

Language

Antisemitism is a word I have written about more than once, but clearly, it’s a word we need to look…

The turf

What makes a good trainer?

We’re spoilt for choice in the Cotswolds. There’s a brilliant National Hunt trainer in every valley and the villages are…

Real life

My parents have driven us to boiling point

After two weeks of us heating the house to the temperature my nearly 90-year-old father wanted it, the door to…

No sacred cows

All hail the chickenpox vaccine!

On 1 January, the NHS announced it would be including a chickenpox vaccine in the bundle of inoculations given to…

Competition

Spectator Competition: Elementary

For Competition 3431, you were invited to submit a passage in which Sherlock Holmes solves one of the great mysteries…

Sport

Don’t blame Ben Stokes

So what was the best bit of this dispiriting Ashes series? Lucky you if you’ve found one, but for me…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: How do I get my friend to clean up after her dog?

Q. Every so often we’re invited to our friends’ house for lunch or dinner. It’s close by and the house…

Food

Scott’s vs Mayfair

Kingsley Amis was obsessed with Scott’s on Mount Street, Mayfair, and he knew a lot about food. He ate himself…

Mind your language

If you’re ‘reaching out’, you sound deranged

‘Why doesn’t anyone do what you ask them to?’ enquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the…

No life

My advice to the next generation

Everyone went to the same school as someone famous. In my case it’s Spider-Man, Tom Holland, who joined my former…

More from life

Why are roast potatoes so hard to get right?

Roast potatoes shouldn’t be complicated. We’re talking two ingredients, plus some salt and maybe herbs if you’re feeling fancy. It’s…