The Spectator
13 January 2018 Aus
Australia
Trial by #metoo media
The Golden Globe awards have come and gone, with Hollywood emblackening itself and making self-righteous declarations against sexual harassment and…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
Frankly, I have been shocked by the appalling revelations of sexual harassment that have come out in the last few…
Australian diary
When I visited India as a tourist 47 years ago I was told that the population of Delhi was about…
Australian Features
Blasphemy or art?
When Indonesian artist Arahmaia-ni Feisal first exhibited Lingga-Yoni, she received death threats. Against scrawled Arabic script, the 1994 artwork showed…
Have a great Invasion Day
Like a national sports event, the annual Australia Day clash between patriotism and shame is upon us again. It’s a…
Business/Robbery etc
It’s not President Trump’s corporate tax cuts, or even the retailer-busting arrival of Amazon to these shores that poses the…
Letter from Beijing
Political extravaganzas in China, like October’s 19th Communist Party Congress, aren’t policy turning points. They are theatre. Only one of…
Nightmares from the Nineties
The release of the Keating Cabinet papers was an opportunity for the Left to salivate over one of their politico-cultural…
In the dark
When I was very young (it must have been before I was sent to boarding school at the age of…
Keep on tweeting, Mr President
There are two ways to judge a president or a prime minister. That which is true is based on policy,…
Features
Welcome to the age of the digital inquisition
A friend of mine at university had a rule: he didn’t want anything to appear online that might ruin a…
Building artificial beauty spots to protect nests is a bird-brained idea
While walking or riding on the beautiful heathland near my home, I have noticed a growing number of signs telling…
Girl power! Educating girls can fix the world’s problems
The world is blessed with a brilliant and industrious UN secretary-general, and it was certainly worth tuning in last week…
For Putin, the World Cup is not about football but global respect
Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of…
Patients like being told they need an operation. It doesn’t mean they do
In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, written early last century, the knife-happy surgeon invents a nut-shaped abdominal organ,…
Britain’s real-life canals are as mystical and marvellous as Philip Pullman’s books
Philip Pullman’s latest missal, La Belle Sauvage, once again features the boat-dwelling Gyptians. Rough and honourable, they emerge from the…
The Week
Something’s gone badly right with the world economy
It is only a few months since gloomy economic commentators were confidently predicting that the world was about to plunge…
The Cabinet reshuffle that exploded in Theresa May’s face
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, tried to shuffle her cabinet, but Jeremy Hunt, the Health Secretary, refused to become…
Trump may be stupid or crazy, but the people enabling him are neither
Like every journalist in Washington, I’m enthralled by the new Michael Wolff book, Fire and Fury, which depicts Donald Trump…
Are things really getting better? The numbers tell us so
Many people are gloomy about 2018. But some things are improving every year… Natural disasters These killed 9,066 people in…
If Trump seems bad, remember Caligula
Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of President Trump, it cannot all be the…
Australian letters
Twelve bad men Sir: In his article ‘Guilty’, it appears that the cases quoted by Andrew Urban were heard by…
Columnists
Remembering Gavin Stamp, former architecture writer of The Spectator
Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in…
The Cabinet reshuffle highlighted Theresa May’s three great weaknesses
‘They are not as strong as they thought they were,’ one Whitehall source remarked to me on Monday night as…
Your Twitter history will always haunt you – if you’re on the right
I once asked Michael Gove, when he had just been appointed Education Secretary, if he would mind awfully appointing me…
Victims of crime should not decide justice
Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case.…
For some girls, therapy does more harm than good
In the churchyard by the church near my grandmother’s house, there’s a tombstone with an inscription that’s haunted me since…
Michael Wolff said the US needed a market-charming president: now it has one
I once commissioned Michael Wolff —currently the world’s most talked-about journalist as the author of the White House exposé Fire…
Books
Australia was ruined the moment Europeans set foot there
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down…
Has Ann Quin’s time come at last?
Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…
My ex-lover’s T-shirt can join the other tragic tat in the Museum of Broken Relationships
I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s…
What America needs is another Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it…
How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…
The thrill of living dangerously inspires the latest first novels
Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short…
Peter Carey’s latest novel is a merciless excavation of Australian history
More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until…
Did the fabled Phoenicians ever actually exist?
So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
Arts
Andrew Roberts’s guide to Churchill on screen
Gary Oldman has joined a long list of actors who have portrayed Winston Churchill — no fewer than 35 of…
Turning marble into cushions and stone into flesh: the magic of Gian Lorenzo Bernini
Seventeenth-century Roman art at its fullblown, operatic peak often proves too rich for puritanical northern tastes. And no artist was…
What Rwanda can teach us about gender equality
What an incredible statement we heard on My Perfect Country. ‘I can walk into a boardroom and forget I am…
The National Youth Orchestra showed that they’re the equal of any professional band
Everyone knows — don’t they? — that the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain is the UK’s youngest world-class symphony…
Three Billboards is a hoot and a blast, which I never thought I’d say about a rape movie
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri does, indeed, feature three billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. They have been placed at the roadside…
Channel 4’s Kiri is already shaping up to be one of the TV highlights of the winter
These days a genuinely controversial TV drama series would surely be one with an all-white, male-led cast that examined the…
The latest astonishing achievement from the creators of War Horse
The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space…
Vox Clamantis
For many of us it probably qualifies as ‘a distant country of which we know little’. Estonia, after decades of…
Life
Taki: How I learned to write
Gstaad What I miss most up here in the Alps are the literary lunches conducted on the fly with writers…
Jeremy Clarke: Escaping from Colditz with Professor Brian Cox
By New Year’s Day I’d had enough of festivities. Instead of getting out of bed, I turned over, put my…
Melissa Kite: No more Cinderella complex; no more males rescuers needed
‘Not being rude, but I don’t think you should do any DIY,’ said the gamekeeper. He had just witnessed me…
How to bee-proof yourself
Kenya First comes a distant hum, rising in volume until I hear it coming straight at me like Niki Lauda…
no. 488
Black to play. This is from Carlsen-Anand, Riyadh Rapid 2017. The needle clash from the Rapid was Anand’s destruction of…
First thoughts
In Competition No. 3030 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘January’. I mentioned William Carlos Williams, R.S.…
2341: Durum, Durum
The unclued lights (one of two words) are of a kind. Across 1 Confines at convenience stores (5)…
to 2339: Interesting
Deployment of a GRABBING CRANE (1D) is required to complete entries at 11, 13, 21 and 23. 1A, 19 and…
Kids addicted to their screens? Don’t worry, there’s an app for that
Over Christmas, Caroline and I finally snapped about the amount of time our children were spending on their screens. If…
More Ashes tours like this and long-form cricket will be in trouble
So will the sight of poor Joe Root at Sydney, pale as a ghost and barely able to stand, heroically…
Mary solves your problem: Is it cultural appropriation for an English person to attend a Burns supper?
Q. Should the lady or the gentleman have the banquette in a restaurant? I’ve been brought up to believe that…
Tea in the hallowed grounds of Lord’s: The Long Room reviewed
As dreams of winning the Ashes became, well, the only word is ash, for 4-0 is not a number even…
Why do so many academics write so badly?
Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as…
