Former Speccie columnist and would-be federal Treasurer Chris Bowen clearly is in need of a decent sub-editor to help him…

NZ success with Labour’s China FTA

I hate first-person journalism, always have. In my early – olden – days as a copy boy with News’ Daily…

The failure of NSW authorities to prosecute an Islamic hate-preacher threatens all ethnic minorities

The push to legalise polygamy will inevitably come next. We would be foolish to embrace it

The push for a 50 per cent renewable energy target is a fantasist’s pipe dream

A state sponsored musical pays homage to Lee Kuan Yew, la

A disruptive Senate is a reflection of a healthy, modern, democratic society

The incentive is greater for people to risk the perilous journey to Europe

By being tough on illegal migration, my country has cut out people-smuggling — and preserved public support for resettlement of refugees

Given his birth date, the nursery won’t even interview him. Thank God the school-start rules are changing for summer-born children

There are plenty of abandoned children in need of help already here

The Front National leader is heading into an election where immigration is the main issue – and the majority of voters are hostile to it

Doctors are not tireless saints. And the ability to deliver both life and death is intoxicating

We have fewer and fewer fires, and ambulance services are under huge strain. There’s only one problem: the Fire Brigades Union

That you need guns to protect ancient sites from Isis is a given — shamefully, you can’t rely on the West to help

Seventy years after George Orwell imagined the Moon Under Water, here’s a modern guide to the ideal local

The Prime Minister should have kept things simple and avoided legalistic talk of imminent attacks

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, told Parliament that he had authorised the killing, on 21 August, by means of…

Plus: Friends, salmon and disabled parking

Plus: the countries that have most refugees, hurricanes decade by decade, and Britain’s prehistoric monuments

As Livy explains, it was Rome’s boast that from early times they understood the virtues of intelligent dealing with outsiders

From ‘The situation in Russia’, The Spectator, 11 September 1915: A new Russia has been arising within the old while the war has…

Mistaken identity Sir: Taki is mistaken in his column of 29 August 2015. Louis XVIII was not a ‘fat Napoleonic…

Blairites once reviled him as a fat thug. Now they reckon he might be the only man who can save their party

Plus: Why does the ummah not help Muslim refugees?; dogs and assisted dying; a Keith Joseph mystery

One day kids will be a lifestyle choice, an accessory, devolved from notions of faith and nature. But we’re not there yet

If our outmoded state model were stopped tomorrow, the same nurses and consultants would be doing just as brilliant work

More than 20 years after the Cadbury report, the rules are a boon for headhunters but no one else. Plus: the Bourneville legacy, and the Queen’s stewardship of the family firm

Reviewing Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, Simon Baron-Cohen, our leading authority on autism, wonders what really went on in Asperger’s children’s clinic in ‘Aryanised’ 1940s Vienna

Christopher Herwig’s weirdly evocative photographs show how the loneliest corners of the former Soviet Union were enlivened by whacky bus shelters

Rob Chapman’s history of Psychedelia and LSD sees California dreaming become the nightmare of the Manson family murders

Fans of Faulks will welcome the ambitious scope of his latest novel on the effects of war — but the aim is more admirable than the execution

Banville’s absurdly mannered, derivative novel is a crime against the English language

Comic-Jewish family kvetching has become a genre in itself — but Hemon’s latest novel raises it to new heights

Death and debauchery are the principal themes of Dynasty, Tom Holland’s lurid history of Augustus and his successors

With climate change, there’ll soon be no seasons to inspire our writers and artists, concludes Alexandra Harris’s vast survey of the role of weather in art and literature

Ivan Maisky’s diaries contain sharp insights on Chamberlain, Churchill — and the ‘blind moles’ in the House of Lords who in 1938 still proclaimed Hitler Europe’s saviour

Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunters and Katherine Rundell’s The Wolf Wilder are properly scary — and sometimes wickedly funny

In Black Earth, Timothy Snyder’s new insights into the Holocaust make us look afresh at one of the most documented periods of history

As we stood on the threshold of the dacha outside Vladivostok, the Australian delegation paused. We had been monitoring Boris…

Harry Mount used to have a ghoulish fascination with murderers. He’s since seen the error of his ways

Marcus Berkmann never realised that he wanted the kind of new old music that these bargain collections offer. Now he can’t live without them

A new British Museum exhibition, Drawing in Silver and Gold, shows how the flowering of visual naturalism in the 15th century owed its development to this magical medium

Plus: a claustrophobic double bill at the Arcola Theatre courtesy of the Grimeborn opera festival

The tone is all over the place, the violence repetitive, and you’ll laugh when you’re not supposed to

Plus: a play at the Dorfman that is hooked on an addictive illusion but still packs a five-star punch

If this Sunday drama sometimes felt less like an adaption of the novel than a 21st-century meditation on it, the result was by no means a disaster

The Australian Chamber Orchestra is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the appointment of Richard Tognetti as its Artistic Director. That…

Once upon a time sport was not political. Nowadays expressing anything that can be construed as orthodoxy is hate speech

But he redeemed himself with a masterclass in the art of chatting up

In a few months we’ll find out what you get when you cross a cocker with a Malty

Hillary Clinton shouldn’t listen to him — his assessments of Cameron and Clegg were way off

The bridge world continues to be electrified by the scandal that Janet wrote about last week. Lotan Fisher and Ron…

The Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, one of the strongest tournaments of all time, has been convincingly won by the…

Black to play. This position is a variation from So-Aronian, St Louis 2015. How can Black conclude the attack? Answers…

In Competition No. 2914 — which was inspired by a speech given by the late Sir Keith Joseph in which…

One unclued light (ignore its umlaut) is the home of a team known by a name which is another unclued…

1D, 3, 15D and 40 are fictional TIGERS (30) created by 20, 35, 4A and 12. Extra letters in clues…

It will reverse the rise of the cognitive elite

Francis Galton was wrong about how people breed – but right, I suspect, about information

Plus: An artist with too many friends; and a knotty legal problem

The young men awash after the Palio present no hazard to the visitor

The favourite compliment of Labour leadership candidates is a grudging sort of praise at best