It’s time the Coalition government stopped fretting about the Covid situation and began to focus on the more serious longterm…

If you need any evidence of the influence of The Spectator Australia, you will find it in the humiliating capitulation…

Europe’s rightward drift Two of the great issues which animated the woke EU establishment until recently were hatred of Donald…

Talkers, we need to talk.. Two things stand out almost immediately when one gets on an early morning train in…

The PLA’s gobbling up of Taiwan won’t be postponed much longer

Hamas prepares the next generation of terrorists

Big four banks don’t dig coal

File it under futuristic fiction

The pushing of vaccines onto the young is obscene

On vaccines, variants and ivermectin

Australia under authoritarian rule

What’s up with North Korea’s leader?

The Royal Academy, a witch-hunt and me

I was 12 when I got into skateboarding: the same age as Sky Brown, the youngest member of Team GB’s…

The acting one sees upon the stage doesn’t show how human beings actually comport themselves in crises, but simply how…

What’s behind Cambridge’s anonymous reporting system?

Tom Holland and Francis Fukuyama on Marxism, football and Trump’s demise

Streaking is a great British tradition

Is this the last chance to save the Church of England

Cambridge has been compromised by China

Treading the boards Sir: As a teacher, I was sorry Lloyd Evans did not include school productions in his excellent…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, said that if a review of coronavirus restrictions on 12 July allowed, then on…

A charge repeatedly made against Boris Johnson over the past 16 months is that he has ‘ignored scientific advice’. But…

Mask crusader Who first wore a medical face mask? — The beaked outfits worn by plague doctors aside, the first…

I’ve been amazed by the response to my decision to leave my band, Mumford & Sons. The article in which…

The recently unveiled funerary monument of Princess Diana prompts comparison with Greek and Roman archetypes. To many, Diana was a…

The long-awaited easing of restrictions will not be the triumphant moment that many expected back in May. The Delta variant…

The Financial Times carried a curious story at the weekend about ‘the secretive process to elect the Lord Mayor of…

In deciding whether or not to wear a mask after 19 July, I am sure Boris Johnson is right that…

I thought that this week I would share with you a bunch of words and phrases which are currently overused…

Our society is bristling with social stigmas, we’re told, even in the progressive West, even in London. Life is so…

Not everyone will have heard of Oli London, a British social media influencer who made news for two reasons last…

For almost as long as there have been books, there have been books about books — writers just love to…

Keith Ridgway’s seventh book is a sultry, steamy shock of a novel, not least because nine years ago, despite the…

When she was 22, Olivia Laing had a sensual epiphany in Brighton. She’d been drawn into a herbalist’s massage parlour…

In the summer of 2019, the journalist Anita Sethi was on a train travelling across northern England when she was…

When I interviewed Paul Theroux 21 years ago at his home in Hawaii, there were already rumours that his ex-wife…

I have the habit, when reading a collection of essays, of not reading them in order. I’m pretty sure I’m…

Serena Williams is not exactly an elegant tennis player — her game is based overwhelmingly on raw power — but…

Lisa Taddeo’s debut Three Women was touted as groundbreaking. In reality it was a limp, occasionally overwritten account of the…

From Bengali schoolboy to citizen of the world – Amartya Sen’s autobiography is a joy, says Philip Hensher

A Sydney lockdown on the heels of Melbourne: what price entertainment? It seemed natural as ever to have recourse to…

They’re changing guard at our two major orchestras; the Melbourne Symphony and the Sydney Symphony. A couple of months ago…

Grade: B– Is there anyone in rock music more irritating and stupid than Bobby Gillespie? The rawk’n’roll leather-jacketed self-mythologiser. The…

Tove is a biopic of the Finnish artist Tove Jansson who, most famously, created the Moomins, that gentle family of…

Zoe Dubno on the rise of the ‘sensitivity reader’, a seductively cheap way for publishers to cancel-proof their books

I’ve been trying to avoid the house TV room as much as possible recently because it tends to be occupied…

Artists’ estates can be a curse on a family. The painter dies, leaving the house stuffed with unsold canvases. What…

Passenger List opens with a carefully structured ripple of breaking news bulletins: a mysterious catastrophe, an unconvincing official explanation, the…

Bach & Sons opens with the great composer tinkling away on a harpsichord while a toddler screeches his head off…

Comedy’s a funny thing. No, seriously, the business of making people laugh is as fragile, as mercurial as cryptocurrency —…

One of my goals over the coming months is to watch an entire rugby game for the first time in…

We are told that sexual assault and sexual harassment happen because men don’t understand consent. NSW has a law before…

When only four horses were declared to contest this year’s Coral Eclipse Stakes at Sandown Park, there were the usual…

Vernon fancies this new age elfin-faced French woman who owns and runs a restaurant. She’s hard-working, she’s a reader, and…

‘Oh, I do so love to see all the lovely pheasants running around the place,’ said the lady walking the…

I have never been a soccer mom, described in the Washington Post as ‘the overburdened, middle-income working mother who ferries…

Gstaad After six-and-a-half months apart, I had no trouble recognising my wife. Out she came on to the driveway to…

The Ritz is still here, and still gaudy. No grand hotel in London feels quite so complete, if pink; as…

Top bridge players have a spooky ability to recall thousands of hands, often from many years back. With so many…

Abhimanyu Mishra became the world’s youngest grandmaster last month, at 12 years and 4 months old. The boy from New…

Unclued lights (one of two words, the others paired) are of a kind. Across 7Lace branches left in fruit tree (6)…

The unclued lights form pairs of anagrams, one word in each pair being a place-name: 1A/6A, 1D/21, 6D/13, 11/38, 19/30…

Q. I live in a row of town houses with a communal strip of garden in front. Three of the…

Even a small dog can be quite high maintenance. No, I’m not talking about Mali, our one-year-old cavapoochon, but Bertie,…

Think of a punishing distance for a bike race. Double it, multiply by ten, throw in two of the world’s…

Black to play. Daggupati–Mishra, Charlotte 2020. 1…Rf1+ 2 Kg2 is a dead end, as White’s queen covers the f2 square.…

In Competition No. 3206, you were invited to supply a sonnet on the universe. The late Frank Kermode reckoned that…