The Spectator
Australia
No time for goodies and giveaways
After 30 consecutive losing Newspolls, knives are out for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison, Julie Bishop and…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
While we’re still in the conference stage of the 2018 Super Rugby competition it’s too early to say whether the…
Neil brown
As you know, The Spectator Australia Education Research Unit is renowned for the quality of its work. Normally, we shy…
Australian diary
Geneva seems oblivious to the end-of-winter freeze that has paralysed other parts of Europe. The trains and trams continue to…
Australian Features
Those dastardly, discommodious Delcons
Remember back to the time of the coup against Tony Abbott when the great and the good (I speak loosely…
More Marxist gibberish
Paul Keating‘s obsession with turning us into some politicians’ republic is not about improving the governance of Australia, surely the…
Dutton earns respect on South Africa
Mariandra Heunis should be enjoying her life with her four children and her husband, Dennis.Only there is no Dennis. In…
The idiocy of cultural competence
A conference held last week by the University of Sydney’s taxpayer-funded National Centre for Cultural Competence has proven once and…
Long she’s reigned over us
The past, wrote L. P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. Even a decade as relatively recent as…
Features
Trump is likely to tweet, fire and forget. His missile strike won’t help Syria
Beirut ‘Gas!’ Bodies piled up grotesquely in a stairwell. No sign of injuries. A father cradles two small children. Still,…
Bombs away: Trump and Macron’s bromance is getting serious
Remember the never-ending handshake? It was 14 July 2017, Bastille Day, and Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump opened their formal…
The mind of Donald Trump, as explained by Anthony Scaramucci
When Anthony Scaramucci announced that he was writing a book about his time with Donald Trump, the joke was that…
Drill, the brutal rap that fuels gang murder
A young man in a grey tracksuit and silver mask looks straight at the camera. He is flanked by others…
Gambia is like a real-life Tinder for geriatrics
When Facebook and co stop selling on our details to third parties, will it be the end of spam? For…
The Spice Girls sang about empowerment – better than the #MeToo whinging
The recent news of a Spice Girls reunion will, I suspect, be greeted by some former fans with nostalgic longing…
Holy snowflakes: why young believers need to accept faith is controversial
As well as writing about religion, I have always been an amateur religious artist. Recently I’ve been getting a bit…
The highs – and occasional lows – of long-distance walking
Long-distance walking is all the rage these days. There are all-nighters staged by charities, for instance the annual MoonWalk in…
The Week
The Commonwealth’s survival is all down to the Queen
Next week, 53 world leaders arrive in London for the Commonwealth summit. It is hard to imagine a better network…
Tension as Britain decides whether to join in air strikes on Syria
Home Parliament was in recess when Theresa May, the Prime Minister, agreed with America and France that the international community…
Can fiction really cure cancer?
If you write a book, even a novel, about Shakespeare you must at least consider the theory that Will of…
Our future queen
From The Spectator, 15 April 1943: Princess Elizabeth will be 17 next Wednesday, which means she is ceasing to be…
Britain has 58,000 ‘travellers’ – but only a quarter live in caravans
Disapproving chorus Derbyshire’s Chief Constable told the all-male Derbyshire Constabulary Choir to sever all police ties unless it takes women.…
Rome and the Jews
Jeremy Corbyn, it is said, does not have a racist bone in his body, and therefore cannot, by definition, be…
Letters: Why I’ll never fly ‘puerile’ Virgin again
For the many not the few Sir: As is clear from the last paragraph of your leading article (7 April), the…
Columnists
The Good Friday Agreement is not a peace but a truce
The Good Friday Agreement (GFA), which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, is not a peace, but a truce. This does…
Will Britain find a new role in the world after Brexit?
Britain’s imperial past distorts the debate about our place in the world, but not in the way that is commonly…
I can never resist a trip to the rubbish dump
I was back at the tip on Sunday. I cannot help it. What art galleries or rock concerts or online…
Why catastrophising is my idea of a good time
When, on a test of general knowledge, the highly educated score far worse than chimpanzees, university degrees may be overrated…
The US Treasury shows London how to cold-shoulder Putin’s cronies
A decade ago I commissioned an article about Vladimir Putin’s business cronies. Among other lines of enquiry, it sought to…
Books
The codes and codswallop surrounding Leonardo da Vinci
‘If you look at walls soiled with a variety of stains or at stones with variegated patterns,’ Leonardo da Vinci…
The changing face of war and heroism
On War and Writing by Samuel Hynes is hardly about war at all. There is little about combat here, or…
Henry Miller — pornographer or prophet?
Few writers seem less deserving of resuscitation than Henry Miller. When the Scottish poet and novelist John Burnside was asked…
Six wintry days in Saratoga Springs: Upstate by James Wood reviewed
Alan Querry, the central figure in James Wood’s second novel, is someone who, in his own words, doesn’t ‘think about…
Rose Tremain’s account of a loveless childhood leaves one aching for more
1991, the Harbourfront Literary Festival in Toronto. The novelist Rose Tremain and the South African writer Carolyn Slaughter are enjoying…
Packing away my 35,000 books was like writing my own obituary
Alberto Manguel is a kind of global Reader Laureate: he is reading’s champion, its keenest student and most zealous proselytiser,…
If you’re planning to become a racehorse trainer, here’s how to do it
With the Cheltenham Festival been and gone, all eyes are on Aintree and the Grand National. These courses feature in…
How one man took on the French betting system — and kept winning against the odds
About a third of the way through this book I worked out that I had an unbeatable system for winning…
It’s impossible to live up to the expectations of motherhood
In a 1974 interview celebrating the quarter century since the publication of her classic The Second Sex (1949), Simone de…
A hymn to self-loathing: Tibor Fischer’s How to Rule the World reviewed
Tibor Fischer has a track record with humour. His first novel, the Booker shortlisted Under the Frog, takes its title…
Give me Shakespeare’s Macbeth over Jo Nesbo’s any day
It must have seemed a good idea to someone: commissioning a range of well-known novelists to ‘reimagine Shakespeare’s plays for…
Sober liberal
Australia has a rich heritage of nineteenth century classical liberalism. But that history has been almost completely lost in the…
Arts
Viv Albertine of the Slits on anger, honesty and being an arsey feminist
Viv Albertine, by her own admission, hurls stuff at misbehaving audiences. Specifically, when the rage descends, any nearby full cup…
Wild Wild Country makes me want to set up my own cult
I have decided to set up a cult, which you are all welcome to join, especially those of you who…
How do these Shaolin monks square six shows a week with monking?
The Shaolin monks are no strangers to the stage. Their home in Dengfeng is a major stop on the Chinese…
Martha Kearney’s arrival at Today is a breath of fresh air
Like a breath of fresh air Martha Kearney has arrived on Radio 4’s Today programme, taking over from Sarah Montague…
The public are quite right to love Monet
Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and…
A gripping new play with a Michael Fish-y narrative: Pressure reviewed
David Haig’s play Pressure looks at the Scottish meteorologist, James Stagg, who advised Eisenhower about the weather in the week…
Mozart died too late rather than too early. Discuss.
Glenn Gould used to say that Mozart died too late rather than too early. The remark was intended to get…
My knuckles went pure white and have yet to return to full colour: Custody reviewed
Custody is both social realism and a thriller and it’s terrific. It is smart, beautifully acted, never crass about the…
Installation view Colours of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay
The French are sharing some of their beautiful visual heritage with us right now. At the AGNSW are the wonderful…
Life
Circe has been recast as the girl next door – it’s a sign of the times
When poor old battered Odysseus landed on Circe’s island having lost all his ships (except his flagship) when he tangled…
I’ve developed a fascination for anti-terrorist security officers
A pair of anti-terrorism officers watched us check through into the boarding lounge. They stood behind the easyJet woman and…
‘See it, Say it, Sort it’ makes me want to self-harm
‘How could you forget to get on the train?’ asked the keeper. ‘I can understand how you forgot to get…
I have to concentrate pretty hard on the Flat when the Grand National hasn’t even been run
William Haggas’s Addeybb heralded the opening of the Flat season by winning the Lincoln Handicap on 24 March but I…
Class club
The annual Hamilton-Russell competition for London Clubs has been won by the Royal Automobile Club, with the Marylebone Cricket Club…
no. 501
White to play. This is from Bluebaum-Anand, Grenke 2018. Anand has been having a rough time in the elite Grenke…
Poison pen
In Competition No. 3043 you were invited to provide a short story inspired by the Salisbury poisonings. Ian McEwan,…
2354: Pioneering
Two unclued lights form a three-word phrase. Clues in italics are cryptic indications of partial answers; in each case, the…
to 2351: Triplets
Unclued lights associated with IRIS are: flowers (2, 11, 40), Greek goddesses (10, 16, 30), and parts of the eye…
I used to think I was smarter than my wife. Not anymore
According to new research published in Advances in Physiology Education, men tend to significantly overestimate their own intelligence whereas women…
Where’s the internet revolution they promised us?
At the risk of sounding like Jean Baudrillard, I would like to suggest that the internet revolution has not yet…
Dear Mary: our son’s future in-laws want to play social oneupmanship with us
Q. We were about to send off to the printers the invitation for our son’s wedding (we agreed to do…
Too much too young: allow some wines to sleep long and peacefully
This April is the cruellest month, but not in the sense that Eliot intended. Memory and desire are mixed: memory…
Around v about: British English v American – not to mention across
Crooning is I think the word to describe what my husband was doing to the lyrics of a Beach Boys…
