The Spectator
11 May 2019 Aus
Dumb question
Australia
Dumb question
The greatest insult imaginable to the intelligence of the average Australian voter was served up the other night by Bill…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
Last week, candidates from all parties were starting to drop like flies as they were disendorsed by their parties for…
Australian Features
Free speech: a right-wing conspiracy?
As a founding member of the United Nations, Australia played a pivotal role in the negotiation of the UN Charter.…
Business/Robbery etc
The Australian Financial Review last week stood out like an island of integrity in a sea of journalistic mendacity when…
Robotaxis to the rescue
Australia enjoys some of the least reliable and most costly electric power in the developed world. There’s some argument about…
Were the Del-Cons wrong?
Well, the election is almost here. In a little over a week we’ll know if Scott Morrison has pulled off…
Barbarians at the gate
Federal Circuit Court Judge Salvatore Vasta once described the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) as ‘the most recidivist…
The nutters we had to have
‘Every now and then you have to flick the switch to vaudeville,’ former prime minister Paul Keating once said, and…
National suicide note
This election is the most important since 2007 when the best prime minister since Menzies, John Howard, was so unwisely…
Features
Train your brain: How to keep your mind young
‘Beep!’ This is one of the most maddening computer games I’ve ever played. I’m tracking a flock of birds, and…
Prue Leith: When did the Samaritans lose their way?
In the past few weeks, on three separate occasions, I have met three different women who for years (one for…
‘Come on, cancel me’: An interview with Bret Easton Ellis
‘I grew up in LA where we all thought fame was a joke,’ says Bret Easton Ellis. ‘My class was…
Grouse moors have destroyed Britain’s natural heritage – so we must rewild them
Britain’s hunting estates were once beautiful. Walking through the New Forest, we can all appreciate how the purchase of land…
Home truths: Are nurseries damaging our children?
As any parent of young children will tell you, toddler groups exist as much for the adults as for the…
25 years off the booze has taught me three simple things
Have you noticed how nearly everyone in the media has won an award? Is there even such a thing as…
Windermere, a voyage into Swallows and Amazons
‘A love of boats and sailing is the surest of all passports to a happy life,’ wrote Arthur Ransome. Standing…
The Week
A royal baby reminds us why the monarchy matters
Strictly in terms of its implications for the succession, the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son this…
Portrait of the week: Labour/Tory Brexit talks, Gavin Williamson’s innocence plea and Cyclone Fani
Home John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, blamed Theresa May, the Prime Minister, for leaking details of talks between the government…
Paul Mason: The Brexit party is great news for Labour
Multiple copies of a Labour leaflet for the European elections are being shared on messaging apps by horrified activists. Not…
Like Theresa May, Claudius struggled to know who to trust
After the sacking of Gavin Williamson, a former No. 10 insider said of Theresa May: ‘One of Theresa’s big faults is…
How to fight Bolshevism
From 10 May 1919: The heart of the country is always for moderation. Nothing could show this more plainly than…
How long before Baby Sussex slips down the line of succession?
Endangered species The UN claimed a million species of plants and animals could become extinct. If they all died out,…
Letters: Stop with the propaganda – marijuana use is not trivial
Scrutinising charities Sir: Toby Young was right to raise questions about War on Want’s links to the Stop Trump campaign…
Columnists
Are the ‘village idiots’ right about Brexit?
The former BBC presenter Gavin Esler has very kindly given us an insight into how BBC people think (had we…
Can May and Corbyn find a Brexit compromise?
Can Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn reach a satisfactory compromise on Brexit? The two leaders’ positions are not, in fact,…
Tweedy or Trainer: Which kind of Brexiteer are you?
‘Too tweedy? Goodness gracious me!’ Rory Stewart sounded startled. A contender for the Tory leadership, he was being interviewed by…
Feminism has succeeded – so why don’t we call it quits?
You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female…
Let’s face it, we’d steal China’s secrets if we could
On the matter of whether former defence secretary Gavin Williamson was the real ‘H’ in Line of Duty, I admit…
Books
How to lose friends and alienate people: Richard Holbrooke was a past master
You may ask yourself, is it worth one of the best American non-fiction writers producing a book of just under…
The only thing that baffled Einstein was his own popularity
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s…
Who needs psychogeography? Plume, by Will Wiles, reviewed
With his first novel about looking after an engineered wood floor, and a second novel about what it is like…
What really amused Queen Victoria? Dwarfs, giants and bearded women
The American dwarf ‘General’ Tom Thumb is only mentioned once in Lee Jackson’s encyclopaedic survey of Victorian mass entertainment, and…
London after the Great Fire: The King’s Evil, by Andrew Taylor, reviewed
The scene is London in 1667, the city recovering from the Great Fire the year before, with 80,000 people homeless…
Is there no end to the retelling of classical myths?
In the past few years there has been a flourishing of literary responses to the Trojan war. To mention a…
A hero of the Franco era: Lord of All the Dead, by Javier Cercas, reviewed
Who is a hero? Javier Cercas, in his 2001 novel Soldiers of Salamis, asked the question, searching for an anonymous…
Character building
Having fired off his first challenge in paragraph one (‘Read every word of this book, but don’t believe a word…
Arts
How film fell for caliphs and slave girls
Most of Hollywood’s Arabian Nights fantasies are, of course, unadulterated tosh. The Middle East, wrote the American film critic William…
A magnificent work of art (but don’t worry if you miss the first half-hour): Small Island reviewed
Small Island, based on Andrea Levy’s novel about Jamaican migrants in Britain, feels like the world’s longest book review. We…
This concert proves it is time to take Michael Tippett seriously
In Oliver Soden’s new biography of Michael Tippett, he describes how Tippett wanted to open his Fourth Symphony with the…
The Holy Grail of concert-going: I Fagiolini deliver serious musicianship that never takes itself too seriously
We’ve all read the article. It does the rounds with the dispiriting regularity of an unwanted dish on a sushi…
Female contestants in Afghanistan’s X Factor are dicing with death
The cheering fans, the dramatic Hollywood-style drum rolls, the excitable host all sound just like The X Factor or The…
A mighty resurrection: Amazing Grace reviewed
Each December in Washington DC, the Kennedy Center Honors anoints five performing artists who have contributed to American life. In…
Would James Joyce have finished Ulysses without coloured pens?
The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800…
Gloriously un-PC: Chris Lilley’s Swiftian, scabrous, gleefully misanthropic Lunatics reviewed
‘Unfunny, boring and utterly unrelenting,’ says the Guardian’s one-star review of Chris Lilley’s new sketch series Lunatics (Netflix). And if…
It made me want to go to sleep and never wake up: Vampire Weekend’s Father of the Bride
Grade: B– One of the things not to like about Vampire Weekend, other than their cloying preppiness, Ezra Koenig’s ingratiating…
Broadway production of Come From Away
We all remember where we were when first hearing of 9/11. Some people were on trans-Atlantic flights. When the US…
Life
A lament for the UK and the US
New York Here’s a question for you: if your wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, toy boy even, lied repeatedly to…
Will the Mistral drive me to murder?
So far this latest Mistral wind has blown for two and a half weeks. The Mistral is said to blow…
I’ve reached scandal saturation point
A letter before action, or something that looked very much like it, arrived on my doormat from an insurance company.…
Farewell to the greatest jump jockey of all time
So the Silver Fox has called it a day. We will never see Ruby Walsh, the man whom even Sir…
Revolutionary
The French Defence appears to be somewhat cautious in nature but can in fact lead to disruptive middlegame clashes. It…
no. 553
Black to play. This is from Carlo-Haast, Grenke Chess Open 2019. There is a saying in chess that when you…
The full English
In Competition No. 3097 you were invited to submit a poem about Englishness in the style of a well-known poet.…
2407: Stickmen
The unclued lights, four of two words, individually or as a pair, are of a kind. Across 11 After…
to 2404: 1+2 = 3+4
The first and second letters of the unclued lights are the same as the third and fourth ones. All the…
The UN’s extinction warning doesn’t add up
Anyone watching the BBC’s News at Ten on Monday would have been surprised to learn that economic growth poses a…
Why don’t we see more big infrastructure projects?
In 2012 I finished a meeting in Berlin and headed to Tegel airport. Apparently mine was a historic flight, since…
Dear Mary: What should you do when friends invite you to lunch but don’t offer wine?
Q. I was invited to birthday drinks in London. On my way there the name of someone I haven’t heard…
Save us from fads and change for change’s sake
There is no new thing under the sun. Over the weekend, I read a book which was alarmingly relevant to…
Do MPs actually know what ‘fungible’ means?
‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do with mushrooms.’ My husband had responded to my exclaiming ‘What does she think…
