As this magazine has pointed out, if you take any single political or cultural issue on its own merits in…

Censoring free speech is dangerous, not to mention downright un-Australian

We need the freedom to debate bad ideas

The tragic formulation of terror

Deterrence, escalation and exploding pagers

On the West’s craven cowardice in the face of Islamist terror

Personal experience does not necessarily lead to better policy

A deluge of terrorism, drugs and refugees

Labour achieves its long-sought-after goal

Kamala released illegal migrant murderers and rapists

For those of us who grew up during the Cold War, it’s heartbreaking to watch the western countries fail to…

Nolo episcopari. These were the words a person was expected to say on being offered an episcopal see. It basically…

Departing Gatwick train station, with nine minutes till Crawley, I tried to get in the head of a Chagossian. In…

Double jab, right, hook body, duck, right… Right, left, right, upper, four hooks… Ten straight punches… And ten more… Twenty…

The Foreign Secretary David Lammy will touch down in Beijing next week to pay his respects. Next year, Rachel Reeves,…

Sometimes it’s the only word that will do. Every journalist at Max Verstappen’s press conference last month understood him perfectly…

Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love – or it’s supposed to be. William Penn, good Quaker that he was,…

I was growing impatient with a recent blog by Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, promising progress, universal prosperity, ‘a space…

Home Sue Gray resigned as chief of staff to Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister. She will become Sir Keir’s envoy…

This Saturday marks Labour’s 100th day in office. But they are unlikely to be popping champagne corks in Downing Street…

Shortly after Boris Johnson was selected as the Conservative candidate for Henley, he invited me to lunch at The Spectator.…

The lives of those daily in the public eye are bound to attract attention, especially when they are politicians telling…

Farewell, Chagos The government announced that it would hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. There are 13 other…

Heart of darkness Sir: It would be difficult to describe my disgust at the news that Australia has just received…

The Queen is dead: long live the King. This week brought an end to Downing Street’s unhappy experiment in dyarchy.…

One of the main arguments against hereditary peerages is that talent and ability are not always passed down across generations.…

We held a small party to celebrate the news that the UK had seen its largest rise in population in…

It is worth upholding the stuffy point which should have prevailed at the start. It was always improper and unethical…

Spectator TV viewers may recall that in last week’s Americano podcast, Freddy Gray interviewed the University of Pennsylvania law professor…

Let me ease you gently into a big and boring-sounding word for a small dishonesty that today corrupts the language…

How excited are you to hear the Prime Minister talking tech with Eric Schmidt, an American billionaire who used to…

It sounds like a Tom Stoppard play. A big-shot philosopher meets a big-shot boffin by way of a big-shot writer…

They were known as song catchers: New York-based chancers with recording equipment packed in the back of the van, heading…

The gifted writer Graeme Macrae Burnet makes a mockery of the genres publishers impose on credulous readers. The author of…

Pickled fish. Lemon tea. Cucumber. Doner kebab. Stewed beef noodles. Salted egg. Soft shell crab. Coney island mustard. Smoked gouda.…

There’s a certain pattern to an Alan Hollinghurst novel. A young gay man goes to Oxford. He’s middle class and…

When the Yale historian and bestselling author Timothy Snyder was 14, his parents took him to Costa Rica, a country…

Lower Than the Angels (that is the condition of man, according to the psalmist and St Paul) is a book…

Historians in Ireland occupy a public role – unlike in Britain, where those with an inclination towards the commentariat usually…

The peculiar career of John Bumpass Calhoun (1917-95), the psychologist, philosopher, economist, mathematician and sociologist who was nominated for the…

Like a cross between Aeneas and Biggles, our intrepid hero travels the world, endures a thousand ordeals and makes himself father of the world’s greatest city

There’s something horrifying about Monsters, the Netflix streamer about the Menendez brothers who, back in 1989, murdered their mother and…

The Almeida wants to examine the ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon of the 1950s but the term ‘man’ seems to create…

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick…

For the maids on the top floors of the Savoy, everything was in turmoil. The 6th had been commandeered by…

I’m a bit disappointed – déçu, as we Francophiles like to say – with La Maison. When French TV drama…

Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Joker (2019), and you have to admire Todd Phillips for returning with…

When does a new opera enter the repertoire? Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert has only had a couple of UK productions…

Before each show on the recent The The tour – reviewed in these pages last week – the pre-recorded voice…

Does Elon Musk have a good eye for the aesthetic? Earlier this month, the Tesla magnate took a break from…

‘When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around,’ wrote Mark Twain,…

In a country that loves its anti-heroes as much as it loves a pub yarn, we’re faced with an important…

In his independent review of the Prevent programme last year, Sir William Shawcross warned that something had gone very wrong…

Q. I meet a very old and dear friend for lunch on a regular basis. We meet at a lovely…

As the joke goes, there are two ways to become a top judge. You can study law at university, then…

Où sont les bouteilles d’antan? For that matter, où sont les amis with whom one consumed them? These autumnally melancholic…

What could be more exquisite than the life of the professional gambler? I began my career in 2016 with a…

My friend replied to my text with seven sets of animal paw prints, interspersed with pink hearts and rounded off…

Competition 3370 invited poems about the predicament of the Nasa astronauts stranded on the ISS – thanks to Paul Freeman…

Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans…