Prime Minister Anthony Albanese graced the National Press Club this week for the first time since the election and expressed…

With a new crop of MPs having just been elected, I thought it might help if I initiated them into…

Make Labor pay for taxing paper profits on super

Enforce Don’s doctrine

The monster is out of control

Tasmanians lose their minds

Tax hikes on imports invite inflation and stagnation

No evidence behind cries of genocide

Behind the moderate masks are hard-left hacks

Labor bans a Jewish American to pander to Hamas fans and Israel haters

Primaries would solve Liberal impotence

Stories about Xi Jinping’s father, Xi Zhongxun, are blowing up on social media. He died in 2002, so why the…

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020.…

Westminster council has announced that every single social housing tenant in the borough will receive lifetime tenancies. No test of…

The porn star Bonnie Blue offers a straightforward explanation for her decision to join OnlyFans. She was in her early…

Last weekend, under windswept banners depicting the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin Mary, nearly 20,000 young pilgrims marched…

Do you remember the lads’ mags? I do because I worked on them for years. FHM, Maxim, all those gloriously…

For 15 years The Clink charity has run commercial restaurants in prisons, training inmates to cook and teaching them front-of-house…

Fenix International occupies the ninth floor of an innocuous office block on London’s Cheapside. The street’s name comes from the…

Published in Britain for at least 330 years, lonely hearts ads are now a rare sight – driven to the…

Flattery will get you everywhere, as the sycophants that surround Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping know.…

Dying wish Sir: As a 99-year-old with, presently, no intention of requesting assistance to die, I am struck by the…

Behind the veil How many countries have banned the burqa? At least 24 have placed some restrictions around the wearing…

‘What happened to Piers Morgan?’ asked a Spectator writer last weekend. The answer, according to slavishly pro-Israel commentator Jonathan Sacerdoti,…

Home Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, was the last minister to agree funding in the government spending review. Once the…

This week’s spending review confirms that where there should be conviction, there is only confusion; where there should be vision,…

The Chancellor’s promise of £14 billion for the Sizewell C nuclear power station in Suffolk is hardly news. The project…

In the autumn of 1940, British cities were being bombed every night by large aeroplanes whose provenance was apparently of…

Why would you choose to make a city crappy? Plenty of cities don’t have much going for them. But when…

The circus around Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia – whose full name the New York Times likes to trot out as…

Gordon Brown may not be every teenager’s political pin-up. But as an Oxford student, Rachel Reeves proudly kept a framed…

Intrepidly, the BBC dared recently to visit Dover, Delaware – source, it implied, of starvation in Gaza. I listened carefully…

What to hold on to and what to let go of is Samantha Ellis’s dilemma when trying to explain the complexities of their Judeo-Iraqi heritage to her young son

A daughter longs to flee her parent’s boarding house in 1930s Provence, but her bid for independence fails in a story of thwarted love and shattered dreams

Animism, divination and shape-shifting witchcraft continued to be powerful forces in the Baltic long after the conversion of Europe to Christianity

Vuong’s disparate characters in rural Connecticut, including a Lithuanian octogenarian and her teenage Vietnamese carer, find fulfilment not in achievements but in loving companionship

Some of Peter Watson’s musings on the empire might have been sacrificed for discussions of music and architecture – and the place of George Orwell in the British imagination

The voice of teenage Edith caring for her pregnant sister in Italy alternates with that of her elderly self in contemporary Ireland in a story of identity, belonging and consent

Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all…

It was America, with its decision to build a global liberal order – not the Soviet Union, with plans to spread communism in Europe, argues Vladislav Zubok

The more complex the infrastructure, the more liable it is to break down – as was recently apparent in the blackout that brought Madrid and Lisbon to a standstill in April

The intimate of writers, politicians and royalty, Benson confined his waspish anecdotes to journals kept over a period of 40 years, now available in a magnificent two-volume edition

The self-styled Gypsy King and his reclusive sister seemed polar opposites – but both painters were selfish, obsessive monsters, according to Judith Mackrell

By the time this is published, your columnist will have seen the students of the National Theatre perform their chosen…

Cul-de-Sac feels like an ersatz sitcom of a kind that’s increasingly common on the fringe. Audiences are eager to see…

Another week, another Wagner production at a summer opera festival. This never used to happen. When John Christie launched Glyndebourne…

On the face of it, Beth seemed that most old-fashioned of TV genres: the single play. In fact, Monday’s programme…

Actors are easily bored on long runs. Phoebe Waller-Bridge once revealed that she staged distractions in the wings to amuse…

Tornado is a samurai spaghetti western starring Tim Roth, Jack Lowden and Takehiro Hira (among others). Samurai spaghetti westerns aren’t…

Last month I watched conductor Harry Christophers blow through what sounded like an arthritic harmonica but in fact was a…

The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a…

What could it possibly feel like to be a sportsperson who gets the yips? To wake up one morning and…

Last week my contacts at Latrobe Valley Law Courts sent me a digital scan of one page of the Leongatha…

Speccie reader (Joshua) asks about the expression ‘unrealised capital gains’ and in particular that worrying adjective. Well, ‘unrealised’ has been…

Competition 3403 invited you to provide an extract from a prequel to a well-known work of prose or poetry. It…

Procrastination may be the thief of time, but in the right circumstances, it can be fun. The other day, I…

Looking back, I can pinpoint my fatal blunder. It was lunch. It was like the West allowing Vladimir Putin to…

‘Sausages,’ my son says to me, leaning forward from the back of the car, with the authority and confidence only…

Bolting down the back hallway, I realised I was running away from the guests. I shut the door marked private…

Magnus Carlsen slammed the table with such force that the pieces jumped from the board. Immediately, he resigned his game…

Laikipia, Kenya For decades now I have kept only cattle, goats and sheep on the farm, but for the first…

In the canteen of the House of Lords last week, a friendly server asked me if I’d like some ‘Pride…

Q. Everyone I know pretends to have neurodivergence to make themselves seem more unusual and so they can talk about…

The standard explanation for why charges for plastic bags reduced waste is economic. People were reluctant to pay 10p for…

Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish…