The Spectator
Australia
The Australian way
This week, in a major speech, Prime Minister Albanese coined a new phrase to describe the actions of his lacklustre…
Australian Features
Now it’s cash for culture
The Yoorrook Commission destroys all Victorians’ equality
Confucius says, ‘Wake up, Albo’
The PM is playing fast and loose with our national security
Towards an Australian Soviet
Forget prosperity on the Australian Federal Ponzi scheme
Moving Australia into Beijing’s orbit
China’s contempt for the Albanese government
Features
Why should the hunt for the next Archbishop of Canterbury be ‘inclusive’?
On 21 July 1828, the urbane aristocrat Charles Manners-Sutton, 89th Archbishop of Canterbury, died. Just two and a half weeks…
The man who’s destroying Spain
Madrid In the mid-1990s, Spain’s socialist prime minister Felipe Gonzalez saw his political career collapse under the weight of a…
Corbyn’s new party is Starmer’s creation
Have you ever been to an activist meeting? A proper one, not a cocktail party for potential donors. If Keir…
The slow delights of an OAP coach tour
Early on Monday mornings, in service stations across the country, armies of the elderly are mustering. These are the OAPs…
Peerless: the purge of the hereditaries
The House of Lords is very old, but not quite continuous. In 1649, shortly after the execution of King Charles…
Does AI belong on the tennis court?
The evidence was clear, the official had dropped a clanger. At 4-4 in the first set of the women’s match…
Good Lords: the House is losing some of the best
Keir Starmer has not been the luckiest general. But, in one respect, he has bested Napoleon. The Duke of Wellington…
Norman Tebbit transformed the country for the better
My first job in government was working for Norman Tebbit as his special adviser in the Department of Trade and…
I’ve got Donald Trump to thank for my unusual middle name
Never make a drunken bet. At about 3 a.m. one fateful morning, pre-pandemic and several bottles down, a friend and…
The Week
Orcas, dolphins and the ancient question of animal sentience
Killer whales have been seen offering titbits to divers – but as a gift or a lure? Plutarch (c. AD…
My P.G. Wodehouse summer
Normally I model myself on one of the more retiring of the Desert Fathers, as much as a man living…
Norman Tebbit was the symbol of an age
Norman Tebbit, who died this week aged 94, was a self-made man who shouldered his way to the top of…
Portrait of the week: Rachel Reeves cries, Rishi Sunak joins Goldman Sachs and a six-month bin strike
Home Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had given a theme to the week by sitting weeping behind Sir…
Letters: Why we need libraries
NHS origins Sir: Your leading article ‘Wes or bust’ (5 July) credited Labour with founding the NHS. In fact, the…
Columnists
Don’t compensate drivers for mis-sold car loans
Surprisingly big numbers are the theme of this week’s column, several having flashed up to disturb the pleasures of a…
How governments gaslight
The posters now plastered around German public swimming pools are so hilarious that you may have seen them already. Keeping…
The reign of Rayner
Angela Rayner declined an invitation to a hen do last weekend where the entertainment included axe-throwing. ‘She was worried about…
My tips to avoid arrest by the Met
An interesting event occurred in London at the weekend. A young man who goes by the name of Montgomery Toms…
The unspoken truth about 7/7
Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something…
Books
Oh come all ye faithful
Catholics make up the largest Christian denomination in Australia. The Catholic Church runs thousands of schools, hospitals, aged care facilities…
A double loss: The Möbius Strip, by Catherine Lacey, reviewed
Lacey writes in the aftermath of two break-ups – one romantic, one religious – in a hybrid work that even she has difficulty defining
Have the Gallaghers suffered from ‘naked classism’?
Their biographer thinks so. But if 1980s Britain had been less class-ridden, the brilliant Noel might have been drawn to further education, got a ‘good’ job and been lost to music forever
The importance of bread as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance
Two authors writing in response to the war use baking as a prism through which to view the country’s heritage and its defiance of Putin
Collateral damage: Vulture, by Phoebe Green, reviewed
Sarah Byrne is covering her first war, reporting from Gaza. But her pursuit of a scoop triggers a series of events that may haunt her forever
Adrift in the world: My Sister and Other Lovers, by Esther Freud, reviewed
A sequel to Hideous Kinky sees the two sisters Lucy and Bea, still close to their bohemian mother, trying (and failing) to negotiate life on their own terms as adults
Whatever happened to Caroline Lane? A Margate mystery
How could a feisty middle-aged woman suddenly vanish from the seaside town without trace? David Whitehouse set out to discover
There was no escaping the Nazis – even in sleep
Soon after Hitler came to power, a Jewish journalist, deprived of regular employment, began secretly recording her nightmares – and, as the terror increased, those of her fellow citizens
A meeting of misfits: Seascraper, by Benjamin Wood, reviewed
An unlikely friendship develops between a taciturn local youth and a fast-talking American film-maker in a grim coastal town in postwar Britain
One of the boys: From Scenes Like These, by Gordon M. Williams, reviewed
An accident on the football pitch ends young Dunky Logan’s dreams of playing professionally – leaving him trapped with the lads in the ‘lair of their ordinary world’
From apprentice to master playwright: Shakespeare learns his craft
The Theatre itself, and the works staged at England’s first purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch, all emerged from the guilds that formed the bedrock of the urban economy
Charles I at his absolutist worst
The months preceding the outbreak of civil war saw distrust of the King become widespread and a ‘new temper’ take hold
Arts
The transcendence of style
Paula Vogel’s Mother Play: a play in five evictions is a superlative piece of theatre and it demonstrates unambiguously that…
How to holiday White Lotus-style: Billionaire Playground reviewed
Today’s television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like.…
A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed
We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many…
Watch the 1978 version instead: Superman reviewed
My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film…
A contradictory staging, but the music floods the ear with splendour: Semele at the Royal opera reviewed
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t.…
What we get wrong about modernism
In The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera writes, witheringly: ‘we must reckon with the modernism of fixed rules, the…
Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’,…
More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed
Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the…
The greatest photography exhibition of all time
I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am…
Life
Aussie life
If you want to get a rough idea of where Australians stand on a particular issue, commission a report by…
Language
Is ‘de-escalate’ in the running to be the Word of the Year for 2025? Or (as seems more likely) the…
Dear Mary: How do we handle staying with friends with very different political views?
Q. We are going to stay with some old friends who we haven’t seen for a couple of years as…
Why driving at 80mph won’t save you time
The device you see on this page is called a ‘paceometer’ and was devised by behavioural scientists Eyal Peer and…
My sober assessment of the fat jabs
It was my friend Alex who tipped me the wink. I bumped into him at a party earlier this year…
Are Reeves and Starmer really in ‘lockstep’?
‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.…
Wine to pass the cricket Test
What to drink while watching cricket? Beer or even Pimm’s for the village green, but I think that a Test…
Are my cattle ready to compete?
Kenya My cattle sensei Mark revealed that my Boran bulls aren’t gaining enough masculine growth after weaning because they’re only…
UzChess Cup
The team of young talents from Uzbekistan, who sensationally won gold at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, continue to develop…
My night at the Spectator summer party
The first rule of the summer party is do not hold your summer party on the same night as The…
Our B&B has found its niche
A rattling noise woke me in the dead of night and I fumbled my way into the dark corridor. It…
Spectator Competition: Between the lines
For Competition 3407 you were invited to write about a historical event euphemistic-ally. This challenge was a little vague; Private…
Salad cream is more than a poor man’s mayonnaise
Salad cream makes me feel oddly patriotic. It’s one of those products that is so distinctively British that it has…
