The Spectator
10 March 2018 Aus
Three billboards outside Canberra, ACT
Australia
Marshmallow fists
The tragedy is that even if Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull were to ‘take the gloves off’ in his battle with…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
I have a minority opinion on two big political issues. Michaelia Cash was right and should not apologise for anything.…
Australian diary
‘Where are you from? Why are you here? What is this week’s reading from the Bible? Where are you eating…
Australian Features
Three billboards outside Canberra, ACT
Back in 2009, when Malcolm Turnbull lost the federal Liberal leadership, the feisty Bronwyn Bishop said that the members had…
Best practice democracy?
People protesting against both the concept and practice of authoritarian government has now become a worldwide phenomenon. It seems high…
Business/Robbery etc
Bed-wetters are on the move; the federal parliamentary Liberal party’s problem is now a liquid liability in Collins and O’Connell…
Data gold-mining
You’re probably not aware of it, but there is an injustice being perpetrated on every man, woman and child who…
Features
Mohammad bin Salman is not a revolutionary. He’s the prince of PR
This week, Mohammad bin Salman, also known as MBS, is on his not-quite-state visit to Britain. A parade down the…
Forget the naysayers. Saudi’s crown prince is the real deal
In an interview this week, Mohammad bin Salman offered an extraordinarily frank assessment of how to combat terrorism. It means…
Transgender activists and the real war on women
How hard is it for women to talk freely about sex, gender and the law? Not very, I used to…
Britain must ‘take back control’ from Russia
Mischief and mayhem work better for Russia than steady cooperation with the western powers. This at least is what the…
In London, dinner parties and murder exist side by side
Last month, a 17-year-old business student of Somali extraction, Abdikarim Hassan, was knifed to death outside a corner shop, 70…
A very EU coup: Martin Selmayr’s astonishing power grab
Martin Selmayr has always dreamed of being known beyond the Brussels bubble. His wish has now been granted, albeit in…
The Katherine Mansfield House
One of the more surprising attractions of Wellington, New Zealand’s small but perfectly formed capital city, is what might be…
The Week
Vladimir Putin is innocent until proven guilty in the Russian spy case
The apparent chemical attack on a former Russian double-agent and his daughter in an English cathedral city could be straight…
Paul Mason: In a parallel universe, Cameron is delivering Brexit
At the BBC early doors for the Today programme, to preview Corbyn’s speech advocating membership of a customs union. I…
Portrait of the week: was the poisoning of a Russian spy a hit?
Home Sergei Skripal, aged 66, and his daughter Yulia were found in a state of collapse on a bench outside…
BBC2’s Civilisations seems unable to decide what civilisation is
The presenters of the BBC 2 programme on civilisations seem unable to decide what civilisation is. Socrates would therefore wonder…
Australian letters
The point of Cory? Sir: I am a paid up member of the Australian Conservatives. Sadly, I suspect the good…
Columnists
The truth about Max Mosley and that leaflet
Almost eight million people have now watched Cathy Newman’s Channel 4 News interview with Jordan Peterson. This figure must be…
The EU shouldn’t punish Brexit. They’d soon regret it
Last Monday, Theresa May’s chief of staff talked junior ministers through her Mansion House speech. Gavin Barwell was frank with…
Italy’s election result shouldn’t be a shock. The populist revolution has just begun
Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister.…
Commitment-phobic men are the real reason women are having children later
We are becoming a nation of older mothers. The average age at which a woman has her first child is…
How did I learn women are superior? From a burst water pipe
‘It’s always me who gets the worst of it,’ said the Fawn, surveying the wreckage caused by the burst water…
Can Theresa May find time to be her own housing supremo?
Theresa May has belatedly taken the advice I offered her here last May and named a supremo to tackle the…
Books
Napoleon’s dazzling victories invited a devastating backlash
On 20 July 1805, just three months before the battle of Trafalgar destroyed a combined French and Spanish fleet, the…
Thomas Paine: spendthrift, scrounger and polemicist of genius
‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again.’ Ronald Reagan made this most unconservative of lines…
Why I now find listening to Beethoven nauseating
Stephen Bernard has led an institutionalised life. Behind the doors of the church presbytery, at public school, on hospital wards…
The CIA, the Vietnam deserters and the aptly named Operation Chaos
‘Keep my name out of it’, was the fairly standard reply when Matthew Sweet started researching the story of the…
Only an idiot would choose to live at any other time than the present
Steven Pinker’s new book is a characteristically fluent, decisive and data-rich demonstration of why, given the chance to live at…
The spectacular suicide mission of the world’s greatest battleship
In April 1945, the Japanese battleship Yamato — the largest and heaviest in history — embarked upon a suicide mission.…
Jessie Greengrass’s Sight is unashamedly philosophical
The precarious stasis of late pregnancy offers the narrator of Jessie Greengrass’s exceptional first novel a space — albeit an…
The miseries of diplomatic life: heat, bedbugs and endless cocktail parties
The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century…
Every day is mother’s day for writers: most have strong feelings about their mothers, though not always of love
You attempt to write a review with a stiff dose of objectivity, but it’s hard not to start with a…
Shadows of the past are ominously present in a trio of memorable first novels
The Shangri-Las’ song ‘Past, Present and Future’ divides a life into three, Beethoven-underpinned phases: before, during and after. Each section…
Doris Lessing: from champion of free love to frump with a bun
‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book…
Arts
Peak Picasso: how the half-man half-monster reached his creative – and carnal – zenith
By 1930, Pablo Picasso, nearing 50, was as rich as Croesus. He was the occupant of a flat and studio…
Nils Frahm is clever with textures – but it’s the melodies which drag you in
Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has…
I never expected to last the full hour: Carla Bruni’s C’est la Vie reviewed
You can’t move for women’s voices on the airwaves at the moment — Julie Walters on Classic FM leading off…
There’s much to adore about the Old Vic’s Fanny and Alexander
Fanny & Alexander opens like a Chekhov comedy and turns into an Ibsen tragedy. Ingmar Bergman’s movie script, adapted by…
A short history of French musical decadence
My two attempts to see Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites at the Guildhall School were frustrated by the weather. Forced back…
Magnificent paintings – oddly curated: All Too Human reviewed
In the mid-1940s, Frank Auerbach remarked, the arbiters of taste had decided what was going to happen in British art:…
Intriguing but also baffling: The Assassination of Gianni Versace reviewed
By common consent, including Bafta’s, The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story was one of the best TV dramas…
The former head of the RSC finds cause for optimism in the Arts Council cuts
He looks like an absent-minded watchmaker, or a homeless chess champion, or a stray physics genius trying to find his…
Hammer horror
You Were Never Really Here is a fourth feature from Lynne Ramsay (Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About…
Artists of The Australian Ballet, Murphy
An entire dance program honouring the work of a single person is a rare honour. The Australian Ballet has graciously…
Life
My date with Steve Bannon
Gstaad The muffled sound of falling snow is ever-present. It makes the dreary beautiful and turns the bleak into magic.…
Was the easyJet representative a fascist?
Earbuds in. Speed walking to Grant Lazlo’s ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’. A corridor, a left fork, a moving walkway,…
My unhealthy obsession with Brian May
‘I bet Brian May isn’t lying on his back in a field shelter wondering how long it’s going to take…
The wisdom of toads, termites and wait-a-bit thorns
Laikipia Off Madagascar the other day the Indian Ocean gave birth to a little storm called 11S. As its gyre…
no. 496
White to play. This position is from Mamedyarov-Savchenko, Moscow 2015. White’s forthcoming tactic led to a decisive material gain. What…
Six plus
In Competition No. 3038 you were invited to provide a (longer) sequel to the six-word story ‘For sale: baby shoes,…
2349: Novel
Clockwise round the grid from 3 run the names (7,4,5,6,8,8,5,6) of four characters in a novel followed by the initials…
to 2346: the name of the game
The unclued entries are all names for pontoon; extra words in 27, 31, 33, 34 and 36 needed the letters…
We are being destroyed by tribalism. Let’s get rid of it
Amy Chua’s latest book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, is a difficult read for anyone who…
Knighting Bradley Wiggins so early was just asking for trouble
The incomparable Roger Bannister, whose passing marks the end of our links with a vanished age of sporting innocence, could…
Dear Mary: My daughter’s new boyfriend isn’t on Facebook – how do I snoop?
Q. Recently I held a party at which some people were meeting each other for the first time. One social-climbing…
As restaurants go, it’s important – and it knows it: the River Café reviewed
Jilly Cooper’s fictional hero Rupert Campbell-Black has ‘never been to Hammersmith’. I have but I wish I hadn’t. I love…
We’ve been saying ‘wrap up warm’ for a thousand years
In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College…
