The Spectator
14 December 2019 Aus
Australia
No time for complacency, ScoMo
The Australian Election Study has analysed every election result since 1987. In seeking to explain why people voted as they…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
The newly elected Morrison government is now just over six months old, so it is probably a good time for…
Australian Features
RAP artists of the ABC
Our household switches on ABC TV at 6pm and checks how long it takes to sight an Aboriginal-identifying Australian. Typically,…
Business/Robbery etc
When directors of Australia’s leading companies start questioning the profit motive on which their success was based, then the system…
Death by reverse dog whistle
On 9 October, 2012 Prime Minister Julia Gillard famously stood up in parliament to accuse Leader of the Opposition Tony…
Submarines versus Facebook
Eyeing Beijing, Taiwan’s political class is nervous, yet again. Australia is jumpy too for lesser reasons. Taiwan’s fear looms close…
Brainwashing your kids
In The New Authoritarianism, University of Sydney academic Salvatore Babones makes the telling observation that while elected politicians might believe…
Politician, thy name is hypocrisy
In the National Party room… everyone…tenaciously… opposed dairy deregulation. (But) when they came back in here (into the chamber), they…
Features
Changing the script: the shifting character of our political parties
Elections should be carnivals of democracy. The campaign we have just been through, though, has felt more like amateur dramatics.…
All the world’s a stage: this election has echoes of Shakespeare and Dickens
The Christmas election has unfolded like a series of mini-dramas from panto, Dickens and other popular classics. Boris has come…
Finland is rebooting its politics – and its new centrism is defined by youth
Helsinki Sanna Marin is the world’s new feminist political icon. At the age of 34, she’s just been appointed the…
The chilling stories from inside China’s Muslim internment camps
Vegetable-seller Kairat Samarkhan didn’t know why he had been summoned to the police station. ‘I had to empty my pockets…
Trans activists are making life harder for trans people
This was the year that the word ‘non-binary’ went mainstream. It has now officially entered the dictionary — lexicographers at…
A river of lost souls: the extraordinary secrets of the Thames
If you spend enough time on the Thames, you will eventually come across human remains. It is a river of…
Is St Edmund’s body buried beneath a Suffolk tennis court?
Here in St Edmundsbury cathedral, a bunch of clerics and local bigwigs are preparing for a most unusual anniversary. Throughout…
Uzbekistan: where east meets west and past meets present
You realise what a rarity western tourists are when the locals ask to take selfies with you. I was standing…
The island where monkeys steal from your minibar
A short flight from Kuala Lumpur, the island of Langkawiis a wise choice for anyone seeking to shake off the…
Tsar quality: the charm of Tbilisi
‘These regions are not under the control of the central government,’ reads a warning on a map of Georgia in…
Why Tuscany always beats Provence for me
A family of peacocks is sunning itself in our villa garden. They all look extraordinarily happy and composed, especially the…
The Week
Politics has fractured along new fault lines – those elected must repair the cracks
It’s easy to see why the Labour party tried so hard to avoid this general election. They looked certain to…
Portrait of the week: Trains stop, a volcano erupts and the nation goes to the polls
Home The nation went to the polls. Engineering works compounded the misery of passengers on the South Western Railway where…
Andrew Sullivan: The evidence against Trump is overwhelming
When people ask me what the mood is in DC these days, the only word I can come up with…
How common are volcanic eruptions?
Volcanic eruptions At least six people were killed when White Island, a volcano off New Zealand’s North Island, erupted. How…
Letters: Why have the Conservatives decided Chesterfield is a lost cause?
Given up on Chesterfield? Sir: Matthew Parris makes some interesting and accurate points about growing Tory support in the north…
Columnists
My run-in with Westminster’s TV news circus
Leaving an evening meeting in Westminster on Monday night, I walked to Charing Cross. Approaching the public path which runs across…
The battle for the soul of the Labour party
In the days before the election, senior Labour people were already discussing how to replace Jeremy Corbyn should the party…
I’ll take Russian democracy over ours
Staraya Russa. About two thirds of the way from Moscow to St Petersburg, in the historic Novgorod Oblast, once the…
Does the truth about Ukrainegate even matter?
If you think the election here has been a disorientating exercise in post-truthiness, try following the latest twists in Washington.…
What have the Anglo-Saxons ever done for us?
It has been a while since I’ve considered the vexed question of Byrhtnoth’s ‘ofermod’. More than 30 years, in fact.…
Take note, Peloton: sweaty blokes make safer marketing
You’ll have had enough of politics and punditry, so let me introduce a non-political City debate (even if rather a…
Books
More juicy gossip from Kenneth ‘Climbing’ Rose
When this second volume of diaries begins in 1979, Kenneth Rose is 54 and well established as the author of…
Who will take on the behemoths of Big Tech?
With Britain having gone through its third general election in four years, the halcyon days of Cleggmania in the 2010…
The Great Barrier Grief — and countless other marine disasters
In the last, wrenching episode of BBC’s Blue Planet 2, there’s a distressing moment when a young Australian diver, expert…
Dave Eggers’s satire on Trump is somewhat heavy-handed: The Captain and the Glory reviewed
A feckless moron is appointed to the captaincy of a ship, despite having no nautical experience. The Captain has a…
Tame family dramas: Christmas in Austin, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
My partner’s brother once found himself accidentally locked into his flat on Christmas Day, which meant having to spend it…
Female partisans played a vital role in fighting fascism in Italy — but it was a thankless task
‘I am a woman,’ Ada Gobetti wrote in a clandestine Piedmont newsletter in 1943: An insignificant little woman, who has…
The good sex award goes to Sarah Hall: Sudden Traveller reviewed
Sarah Hall should probably stop publishing short stories for a while to give other writers a chance. If she’s not…
What is the relationship between truth and accuracy? The Lifespan of a Fact reviewed
At the time, I’m sure it all seemed absolutely hilarious. It was in 2012 that W.W. Norton first published The…
Who knew that chemistry could be so entertaining?
Here’s how the element antimony got its name. Once upon a time (according to the 17th-century apothecary Pierre Pomet), a…
Spy who came in from the EU
I read Mr le Carré’s latest spy novel, Agent Running in the Field last weekend, despite everything. What do I…
Arts
Don’t tell me model railways aren’t art. My little engine is a thing of spirit and beauty
It’s a summer day at Llangenydd station, and the afternoon train is already late, not that anyone seems to mind.…
To fill a major Tate show requires a huge talent. Dora Maar didn’t have that
Dora Maar first attracted the attention of Pablo Picasso while playing a rather dangerous game at the celebrated left-bank café…
One hell of a concert: Opera North’s Bluebeard’s Castle reviewed
Freud knew something about fear. Not the sudden shock of terror, but the creeping, sickening, slow-burn horror of the uncanny.…
Why on earth did Glenda Jackson give up acting? BBC1’s Elizabeth is Missing reviewed
Watching BBC1’s Elizabeth Is Missing made one of the more puzzling decisions of recent decades seem more puzzling still. Entirely…
A son-et-lumière spectacular: The Chemical Brothers at the O2 Arena reviewed
How does one account for the phenomenon that is the Chemical Brothers, a quarter of a century on from their…
A flimsy tale of self-pity and thwarted ambition: Hunger at the Arcola reviewed
Oh my God. The Nazis have invaded the Arcola Theatre. Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsen won the Nobel Prize in 1920…
Hugh Ramsay “Miss Nellie Patterson” 1903
This is a great time of the year to visit Canberra and the National Gallery. Despite some ‘gender equality’ grandstanding…
Life
My friend Margaret Thatcher
By the time you read this it will all be over, but will it? I’ve had a bad feeling all…
Smoking opium with Mr Nazim – and a gecko
‘I used to go to India for a few months every year. A couple of times we even drove there.…
Our local Tory candidate’s leaflet was the most disturbing of them all
‘Oh, it’s you!’ said the builder boyfriend to the Tory MP in his shooting jacket, as he made his way…
Ding’s wings
Ding Liren, from China, was a convincing winner of the 2019 Grand Chess Tour, which reached its climax in London…
no. 584
White to play. Aronian–Carlsen, December 2019. Carlsen won the third-place playoff, but Aronian found a nice finish in this game.…
Dear Santa
In Competition No. 3128 you were invited to submit letters to Santa written in the style of the author of…
2438: Shining bright
One clued solution (which solvers must highlight) can be linked with eleven unclued solutions, (one in the plural). Brewer confirms…
to 2435: A Little Puzzle
Unclued lights are DWARFS. First prize Bill Stewart, LeicesterRunners-up Mark Roberts, Luxembourg;John Bartlett, Solihull
How could any woman fail to be won over by my new cinema room?
As Christmas approaches, fighting has broken out in the Young household. No, I’m not talking about my three boys, aged…
Only now are we seeing what an extraordinary figure Bob Willis was
Maybe it’s just an age thing, but the death of Bob Willis has left me — and, I am sure,…
Dear Mary: What can we do about our son’s girlfriend’s appalling table manners?
Q. My son has a girlfriend who we like but who has appalling table manners. They come to stay most…
Sumptuous, remote – and forgettable: Locket’s reviewed
Locket’s is a new café from the owners of Wiltons in Jermyn Street. Wiltons is the restaurant that dukes visit…
Where did ‘aconite’ spring from?
‘What,’ asked my husband teasingly, by way of an early Christmas game, ‘connects wolf’s-bane with Woolwich Arsenal?’ It took me…
