The Spectator
Australia
She’ll get blisters
Yet again this magazine has proven uniquely prescient in its warnings and its advice, a claim that regular subscribers will…
Australian Features
Puritanical rule in lockdown Australia
Calvin’s henchmen had nothing on our premiers
Is Trudeau toast?
The Canadian election campaign is not going as the Liberals hoped
The return of the racism versus rape debate
Is the West really prepared for an influx of angry young male Afghan refugees?
Features Australia, New Zealand
More than one way to ruin a country
New Zealand needs to look to Switzerland
Features
Treehouses
You can’t (and probably shouldn’t) design a treehouse. Treehouses should grow organically, in every sense: they must be made of…
Letter from Kabul
The Taliban Cultural Commission sounds a contradiction in terms but for all foreign journalists it’s the first stop in the…
The Week
Portrait of the week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, announced a new tax in the Commons branded a ‘health and social care levy’.…
Emergency exit
For 18 months, the government has held power over us as never before in peacetime. The emergency powers granted by…
Root cause
A ‘State of the World’ report warns that a third of the world’s wild tree species are threatened with extinction.…
Columnists
Tea with the WI offers lessons on responsible investment
Late-breaking exam results: many of the City’s top fund managers have failed a vital test of ‘stewardship’ — defined for…
Could you live without sex or the Tories?
In idle chatter the other evening, somebody pooh-poohed champagne. He was a brave soul because in certain circles — and…
Boris is in dangerous territory
The announcement of a tax increase for both workers and employers to fund more spending on health and social care…
The political power of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown
There is a rather sweet moment in the middle of each Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show where, after some magnificently obscene…
Defund the world’s policeman?
It gets lost in the many creative purposes successive American administrations invented to justify remaining in Afghanistan, but the primary…
Books
In the heart of the night
They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon…
An odd, unsettled time
The word ‘magisterial’ consistently attaches itself to the work of David Kynaston. His eye-wateringly exhaustive four-volume history of the Old…
Eavesdropping on history
The famous photographic portrait by Karsh of Winston Churchill as wartime prime minster personifies heroic defiance and grim determination. His…
Always entertaining
It is often said that the best political diaries are written by those who dwell in the foothills of power.…
Life, love and alienation
The millennial generation of Irish novelists lays great store by loving relationships. One of the encomia on the cover of…
Afghanistan’s lost hope
Ahmed Shah Massoud was described as ‘the Afghan who won the Cold War’. While famous in France (he was educated…
Seeing red
After leaving college more than two decades ago, Evan Osnos landed a job on the Exponent Telegram, one of two…
Addicted to love
Ruth, the narrator of Susie Boyt’s seventh novel, is both the child of a single mother and a single mother…
More than a club
Even against our better judgment we tend to imbue our sporting heroes with characteristics they may not possess. This can…
From Holy Mother to Black Dragon
The Amur is the eighth or tenth longest river in the world, depending on whom you believe. The veteran travel…
Everyday matters
Many would say the commute was one thing they didn’t miss in lockdown. But when Lauren Elkin was ‘yanked out…
Hope springs eternal
What is life if not a quest to find one’s calling while massaging the narrative along the way? This question…
Magical mountains
A magnificent new history of the Caucasus earns Peter Frankopan’s highest praise
Arts
Thomas Mann
And so Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge is Melbourne’s musical-in- waiting. The show that can only go on when we’re 80…
Tsunami of piffle
Deep breath. Here goes. Winsome Pinnock’s new play about Turner opens with one of the most confusing and illogical scenes…
Man up
‘The world is hell, and men are both the tormented souls and the devils within it.’ This was the cheery…
Sale of the century
In my bedroom there is a small lidded laundry basket. It was designed by Geoffrey Lusty for Lloyd Loom, a…
Darkness visible
Translating the story of Jimmy Savile to stage or screen is a creative minefield, says Jonathan Maitland, who knows from first-hand experience
Divine comedy
Arthur Sullivan knew better than to mess with a winning formula. ‘Cox and Box, based on J. Maddison Morton’s farce…
Bricking it
Herself is an intensely powerful film about domestic violence that isn’t Nil By Mouth or The Killer Inside Me or…
Crude mittens
Let me give you a free piece of relationship advice: just break up. If it’s more work than pleasure, if…
Life
Aussie Life
Do fish have feelings? And if they do, does anybody care? RSPCA Australia’s willingness to lease their logo to salmon…
Aussie Language
The New York Times has chosen a word to describe what happens to people under Covid restrictions: ‘languishing’. Under lockdown…
The brave new world of work
Is flexible working better or worse for productivity? What is the correct blend of remote and office work? Billions of…
The stories that are too good to check
Last weekend, Rolling Stone ran a story about an interview an emergency room doctor had given to a local news…
Testing times
In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer…
Quenelles
When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he…
TB or not TB
In Competition No. 3215, you were -invited to supply a poem about Geronimo the alpaca. The camelid’s fate was finally…
Solution to 2520: 5 4 3 2 1
The unclued lights are the names of the six principal presenters of COUNTDOWN (hence 5 4 3 2 1 as…
2523: Monstrous regiment
The unclued Across lights are of a kind when preceded by one word, as are the unclued Down lights (one…
Puzzle no. 670
White to play. Harvey–Roberson, Northumbria Masters 2021. Black’s last move, 37…Kf7-e7 looked plausible, but walked into a clever tactic. What…
Cherry clafoutis
My daydreams at the moment follow a predictable theme. I am on holiday somewhere balmy, with a carafe of cold…
Titles bonanza
At the beginning of August, seeing his outstanding performance at the Fide World Cup in Sochi, I wrote that Ravi…















































































