Virginia, your little conservative friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a sceptical age. They do…

It is good to see the Greens doing their bit to stop the evil gender bias and stereotyping now so…

Turnbull the blackbird has been obsessing me, stealing what’s not his. He’s hovering by a nest right outside my study…

A delicious look at the tastiest morsels of the year

Our politicians are taking us down the path to Argentina

The controversial African-American ancestral tale is being retold... partly by me

Much like the first convicts, Australians today cower before the great moralisers of the day

Two of Australia’s most powerful women hailed from witch towns. Cue the creepy music

So here’s a question for the history buffs – name the last Australian Knight. The Queen presented the Award at…

One is a distinguished author and columnist. One is an acclaimed playwright. Both grew up near in Bexhill-on-Sea. They disagree about everything . . . almost

The Archbishop of Canterbury talks about faith, politics, and whether he'd attend if one of his children had a gay marriage ceremony

We know about insecurity and fluid identity, it's true. That doesn't mean we should bang on about it on the BBC

Marsh harriers, chiffchaffs, blackcaps and little egrets find British winters much more congenial than they once did

The Prime Minister on his unexpected election victory, European crises, the Middle East and the legacy he wants

Facing Donald Trump could make any candidate look good. Except perhaps this one

Politics is about applying values with an open mind, not about using ideology to avoid hard questions

A.A. Gill's Christmas notebook: From a food festival in Margaret River, Western Australia, with sleepy koala bears

I’m not sure how well I knew him, but it was enough to be with him in so many moments of pleasure

Fifteen years of western intervention achieved no more than the pretence of a stable state

Joan Collins's notebook: 'Happy holidays' in Birmingham and Hollywood; and a word on Donald Trump

From Lord Sewel to – let’s not be sexist – Sally Bercow, there’s life in the old rogue yet

Anthony Horowitz's Christmas notebook, also featuring the decline of ebooks and the birth of New Blood

Also in this Christmas notebook: a hairdresser called ‘they’, and what I found out on my speed-awareness course

Favourite Christmas rituals – and what to avoid for a successful Christmas. With Clare Balding, Alexander McCall Smith and Tim Rice

Stoicism has already made a comeback... so what other age-old beliefs can be repurposed for the 21st century?

Doctors and nurses in fancy dress felt like a percious link with normal life outside as my teenage son fought bacterial meningitis

The former shadow chancellor’s step-by-step instructions for perfect individual crab and Gruyère soufflés

A Christmas short story by Wilkie Collins, illustrated by Carolyn Gowdy and with an introduction by Philip Hensher

Galleries, faded grandeur and a particularly fine Piazza Garibaldi

Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics has outsold even Fifty Shades of Grey in his native Italy

The Prime Minister should say it more often: the people of the United Kingdom are better together

January David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that only electing the Conservatives could ‘save Britain’s economic recovery’. Labour unveiled a…

Plus: surgeon's cuffs and souls in transit

And other surprising anniversaries of 2016

The classical world was full of enterprise – in a way that's only just coming back

From ‘The Sacrament’, The Spectator, 25 December 1915: We were fairly fagged out, all of us, after a heavy day…

Also featuring Mark Mason's Test record, and a heartfelt thank-you to Spectator Health

They include students, cyclists, e-cigs, roibos and that frightful woman who does Any Answers on Radio 4

He's betting on it. He might yet have to win with a far less appealing offering

After the Paris murders, French voters simply did not buy the outpourings of delusional wishful thinking from the liberal authorities

A passage by George Eliot emphasises the huge ache at the heart of our moral reasoning

How an olive-green shirt from Topman convinced Twitter I must have belonged to the Israel Defense Forces

My year with Ole Anthony’s Trinity Foundation left me with only an admiration for grown-ups who never succumb to normality

What are you to do when the masked Santas burst into the boardroom?

Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue explore the essential weirdness of Eliot’s poetry in a way that has never been done before

With time on his hands, the young Assistant Resident made an exquisite record of Nepal’s architecture and wild life, and rescued countless Buddhist manuscripts into the bargain

The globe-trotting Theroux finally explores America — and finds the deep South more foreign than anywhere abroad

Henry Jeffreys reviews stories by P.L. Travers, Laurie Lee, Hans Christian Andersen — and a modern take on Scrooge

In A Monstrous Commotion, Gareth Williams describes the weird fraternity for whom finding the Loch Ness monster has become the ultimate grail

Three new books on fashion through the ages illustrate the potentially fatal danger of becoming a slave to the latest trends

In Gratitude, his valedictory memoir, the gifted doctor finally achieves a sense of peace with himself after a life well lived

Brian Copenhaver’s learned discourse may prove impenetrable to those not already versed in the arcane mysteries

Both Patrick McGilligan and Simon Callow sympathetically capture the larger-than-life maverick who detested appearing in any film that wasn’t his own

Julie Burchill admires Hynde’s candid memoir, but is thankful that, as a teenager, she didn’t hang around with her for long

Andrew Gant’s authoritative study of English church music is ruined by mateyness and coarse tabloidese

But the astronomer Marek Kukula wonders whether Colin Nicholl’s exhaustive treatment of ‘the Great Christ Comet’ may miss the whole point of the gospel story

India Knight is amused by how often the perfumes people choose to wear absurdly mismatch their personalities

Pour Me, Gill’s frank account of his struggle with alcoholism, pays heartfelt tribute to Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous

The waspish critic, who died earlier this year, is also a haunting presence in this paean to Henry Royce and his magnificent creation

Test your knowledge

In Nicotine, Hens memorably describes being ‘repulsed and overjoyed’ to have spotted a smoking area (‘a kind of suffocation chamber’) at the airport

A hitherto unpublished collection of the poet’s photographs range from affectionate studies of friends to sombre landscapes viewed from high windows

Lancaster’s delightfully sardonic spoof architectural histories are handsomely republished by the Pimpernel Press

1. Ill-met by moonlight (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) 2. Hope springs eternal in the human breast (Pope’s ‘An Essay…

In an age of white noise Christopher Pyne’s A Letter to My Children (MUP, $33) stands out as a loving…

Martin Gayford investigates how this splendid Tahitian Madonna came about and why religion was ever-present in Gauguin’s art

Her best illustrations - limpid, ethereal, carefully observed - are masterly works of art in their own right, argues Matthew Dennison

Sony was the Apple of its day and more. Stephen Bayley charts its years of creativity unrivalled in the history of consumerism

They rescue their double bill, however, with an admirable Pagliacci. Plus: at the Barbican, Leoncavallo’s Zaza: plotless, vastly too long, musically weak - and thrilling

As well as being filthy, Stars Wars taught Hollywood how to make children’s films for adults and they’ve never looked back

Raymond Revuebar's winking hoarding is like a righteous raspberry to the perpetrators of the Paris atrocities

Plus: the kamikaze rudeness of Rudolf Nureyev hits the big screen

The parallels are pervasive but conductors earn proportionately more - often as much as half an orchestra - and they hang on for years after their sell-by-date

In almost every way, Lily Tomlin, who plays the tart-tongued Grandma, is wonderful

Plus: a Turner Prize entrant that got lost on its way to Tate Modern by Caryl Churchill at the Lyttelton

Nothing warms the cockles of James Delingpole's heart more than this superbly acted BBC2 drama on the making of Dad's Army

Plus: a Radio 4 documentary that gives a real insight into what it’s like to be a Syrian refugee

Don’t they realise pop music is supposed to be naff?

Time for a quick glance over my shoulder at the passing year. Culturally it was busy enough but with little…

A knife used to give me peace of mind; now I find solace in prayers

I became hooked on vaping (flavour: peach) thanks to a Cretan beauty

I generally only need a boyfriend for two weeks in December but I might want to keep this one after Boxing Day

My faith is wobbly but I’ll go to church on Christmas Day to show my contempt for Odeon and Cineworld

Disembowelled dogs; snakebites; rhino’s rectums; it’s all in a day’s work for the vet Hugh Cran

There is plenty of good fun to be had in naming horses

2015 leaves many bridge players with mixed emotions. I have played in more wonderful, high-level tournaments than ever before (Iceland,…

Set by Christopher Howse.
Illustrated by Castro

By the time this article appears, the London Classic at Olympia and the newly created brainchild of the indefatigable Malcolm…

White to play. This position is from Fernandez-Jackson, Aberystwyth 2014. White brilliantly exploited the draughty position of the black king…

In Competition No. 2927 you were invited to submit a Christmas carol written in the style of a writer of…

Along the top and bottom rows of the grid runs a seasonal quotation of 11 words. 81 clues contain a…

The title suggests BACK NUMBERS (8/15). Remaining unclued lights contain ‘back numbers’: GENEVESE (1A), MARXIST (20), GENETTE (24), XENON (37),…

Caroline and I have different ideas about every single aspect of Christmas. It’s all part of the fun – for me anyway

2015 began and ended with epic high notes: the scaling of the Yosemite’s Dawn Wall and Great Britain’s magnificent Davis Cup victory

Ideologically, it is impeccable; and you can ride the wild water rapids with the Welsh and get a minor spinal injury

How Sony’s founder ignored market research and defied his own engineers to make a huge success of the Walkman

This should be an earthly paradise. It hasn’t quite worked out that way

On being an arbiter of what is common; how to control one’s face when opening presents; and how to treat the demands of food faddists

From safe spaces to NSFW

On the record 1. Jean-Claude Juncker 2. David Cameron 3. Sir Tim Hunt 4. Jeremy Corbyn 5. President Vladimir Putin…

Welcome to the inaugural Spectator Australia Wine Club offer. This page will focus on the unprocurable wines, the small-volume award-winners,…