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The Spectator

11 November 2023 Aus

How to police protest

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Deport the Jew-haters

‘I will f—king find you. Hunt you down. Gas you. Kill you. Teach you a lesson. Your (sic) f—king Jew.…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Three steps to victory

How the Libs can win the next election

Features Australia

Israel’s 10/7

Forget 9/11. This was the entire Vietnam war in one day

Features Australia

Don’t be fooled by Hamas

Giving money to Gaza is not the Christian thing to do

Features Australia

How Green is my Snowy?

Renewables teeter as Turnbull’s white elephant is stuck in a financial bog

Features Australia

Burney for G-G? Say No!

The Voice saleswoman should not be let anywhere near Yarralumla

Features Australia

Ideas dominate over vested interests

Elites first exposed here, before US and UK

Features

Features

How to police protest

Armistice Day is meant to be a moment of solemn national unity. Yet this year it is expected to coincide…

Features

Why was an erroneous graph used to justify the second lockdown?

Two stories are emerging from the Covid Inquiry: one that it wants to tell and one that it does not.…

Features

Benjamin Netanyahu is increasingly seen as Israel’s curse

  Jerusalem   On Tuesday, I was driving down to an Israeli army headquarters on the border with Gaza as…

Features

The unfathomable depths of Palestinian despair

Away from Gaza, things are getting worse in the West Bank. I’ve received many messages from Palestinian friends raging at…

Features

What do sugar and cocaine have in common?

Stephen Fry is a national treasure whom half the nation can’t stand. He drops his façade of loveability mid-chortle as…

Features

How to speak London

Cockney is dead, but so is the King’s English. Long live Standard Southern British English. The Cockney Barbara Windsor yelling…

Features

Any protest which threatens the Cenotaph is a travesty

Every year I lay a wreath a week early, because Blyth, my nearest town, was a submarine port. Submariners were…

Features

The overlooked genius of Ronald Firbank

This week English Heritage has put up a blue plaque to the novelist Ronald Firbank, and I know, from 40…

The Week

Leading article

Britain has led the way on migration

Human trafficking is a multi-billion-pound global industry. It is fuelled by the desperation of migrants seeking a better life and…

Letters

Letters: Israel/Gaza isn’t the time for fence-sitting

Ill-judged Sir: Professor Carl Henegan’s authoritative demolition of the Covid Inquiry (‘The Covid whitewash’, 4 November) prompts the question of…

Columnists

Columns

Hope might be the only strategy Sunak has left

The first King’s Speech for more than 70 years was a festival of the expected: the royal reading of a…

Columns

Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now…

Columns

Are you a creative or a destructive?

There is a stage direction in The Glass Menagerie in which Tennessee Williams describes a tune that will recur through…

Books

Australian Books

Rip-roaring satire in Iota

This novel is the ninth book of the satirical series concerning Grafton Everest, a rambunctious, overweight, fictional academic who, as…

More from Books

The best of this year’s children’s books

Among many delights, the Greco-Persian wars are brought to thrilling new life and a truly bizarre Alaskan folk tale is retold

More from Books

Why do the British still dream of bricks and mortar?

For the past century, a ‘property-owning democracy’ has been envisaged as a kind of magic cure for social ills. But high prices now mean the opposite of emancipation for many

More from Books

Magnificent men in their automobiles: the 1907 Peking-Paris rally

Kassia St Clair tells the gripping story of how competitors drove 15,000 km across mountains, desert and flooded rivers to prove the practicality of the early motor car

More from Books

Tea and treachery: Sheep’s Clothing, by Celia Dale, reviewed

Posing as social services employees, two female ex-cons talk their way into the homes of elderly widows in order to drug them and steal their valuables

More from Books

From the Odyssey to The Wizard of Oz: Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, reviewed

Everything blends into everything else as an Aboriginal knight errant sets out on a quest to save his scorched native bushlands

More from Books

The horror of finding oneself ‘young-old’

‘I used to run upstairs all the time,’ sixtysomething Marcus Berkmann recalls wistfully, as, midway through life’s journey, he wakes to find himself in a dark wood

More from Books

A bird’s-eye view: Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, reviewed

Six astronauts at the International Space Station observe the ravages on Mother Earth, but remain hopeful that mankind will find another parent planet

More from Books

No laughing matter: accusations of transphobia wrecked Graham Linehan’s life

The comedian found himself out of work and out of his marriage when he challenged the transgender ideology that to be a man or women is about choosing an identity

More from Books

The beauty of medieval bestiaries

Spiders, owls, elephants and dragons appear alongside dog-headed men and tusked women in a wealth of texts explaining the world in the most vivid terms then available

More from Books

Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings of Renaud Camus, reviewed

The French writer does not accept that all incomers to his country can be truly ‘French’, and considers the dramatic change of population an unprecedented disaster

More from Books

Love and loathing at Harold Wilson’s No. 10

Even her enemies considered Marcia Williams the prime minister’s ‘political wife’, and the real force in the Labour party from the mid-1960s to Wilson’s resignation

Lead book review

Books of the year II: more choices of reading in 2023

Recommendations from Mary Beard, Richard Ingrams, Sam Leith, Francis Wheen, Michela Wrong, William Dalrymple and many more

Arts

Australian Arts

Character acting without the character

Miss Saigon may on the face of it seem like an odd choice of musical for Opera Australia to revive…

More from Arts

Has all the charisma of Chernobyl: Manchester’s Aviva Studios reviewed

There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the…

Dance

Subtle, intriguing and inventive: Rambert’s Death Trap reviewed

Ben Duke belongs to a class of younger choreographers who have decided to flout the convention that dancers should remain…

Theatre

Branagh can’t quite banish the spirit of Noel Edmonds: King Lear, at Wyndham’s Theatre, reviewed

Branagh vs Lear. The big fixture in theatreland ends in a win for Shakespeare’s knotty and intractable script which usually…

Exhibitions

Embarrassment of riches: South Asian Miniature Painting, at MK Gallery, reviewed

In 1633, British merchants travelling east were issued with a royal command from Charles I: ‘As the king has considered…

Television

Incomprehensible and epically anti-climatic: Netflix’s Bodies reviewed

Bodies is another of those ‘ingenious’ time-travel apocalypse mash-ups so tricksy and convoluted that by the time the ending comes…

Cinema

Entertaining. Mostly: Dream Scenario reviewed

Dream Scenario is a high-concept dark comedy about celebrity and cancel culture. It stars our old pal Nicolas Cage who,…

Classical

Funny, faithful and inventive: Scottish Opera’s Barber of Seville reviewed

A violinist friend in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra used to talk about an orchestra’s ‘muscle memory’; a collective…

Pop

This recreation of Dylan’s Free Trade Hall concert is supremely good

In May 1966, Bob Dylan toured the UK with The Band, minus drummer Levon Helm, and abrasively pulled the plug…

Radio

Joni Mitchell, in her own words

There’s always been something at once girlish and steely about Joni Mitchell, the stellar Canadian whom Rolling Stone called ‘one…

Arts feature

The rise of Christian cinema

Robert Jackman on the rise of Christian cinema

Life

Kiwi Life

Kiwi life

It’s almost a cliché to say that 15 March, 2019 was a black day in New Zealand’s history; in fact…

Aussie Life

Language

I suggest the right word for Hamas is ‘barbarians’. It was the Greeks who coined this word when savage, uncivilised…

Food

‘The food is as good as you will find in London’: Saison at Raffles London, reviewed

The Old War Office (bad acronym OWO) on Whitehall is now a Raffles hotel: you can stay in Winston Churchill’s…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: how do I stop my wife from sleeping naked?

Q. Wealthy ex-pat friends came to stay and, despite being attended to assiduously by our major domo, they left without…

Spectator sport

English cricket doesn’t travel well

It’s a tricky old time for cricket. The collapse of England’s World Cup white-ballers – and how they have managed…

No sacred cows

Why I’m optimistic about multiculturalism

Many of my conservative friends are beginning to catastrophise about the future of Britain in light of the pro-Palestinian protests…

More from life

Be prepared to wait: how to make French onion soup like the French

Let me be clear: this week’s recipe is not a speedy little number. You can’t knock up a French onion…