As the nation embarks on a critical federal election, both sides of politics have decided to launch a brutal assault…

Rules of engagement

The gap between Australia’s and New Zealand’s defence capabilities is an embarrassment

Britain’s engagement with Europe is heading for the rocks

The likelihood of deradicalisation programs being of any use is slim

How to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse

What ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ has a chance of seriously backfiring

The Turnbull government is hellbent on introducing changes that are anti-Liberal

The Michael Subotzky interview

In an exclusive interview, the former mayor of London sets out his Brexit battle lines

As potential vice president, ultra-hawkish Marco Rubio could cool down the Republican party’s bitter enmities

The web was meant to empower us all. Right now, it’s empowering censors

Many are building vast glass palaces to take on more and more students

I’ll go first: strawberries, beaches, champagne, Ella Fitzgerald and Richie Benaud

When my time comes, I don’t want a ‘celebration of life’. I want tears

There's life in the spectacle yet

As David Cameron’s Brexit ‘war’ scare is rightly mocked, no one is talking about our crucial military alliance

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, made a speech in the British Museum warning of war if Britain left the…

The campaigning bit is great, but come polling day I’m a wreck

Also in our Barometer column: how astrologers fool people; the debts of the aged; DNA profiles

The mayor was not attacked for who he is, but for the company he kept

We need an Irish Secretary who can be trusted. Who dare say that of Colonel Churchill?

Metal cocoon Sir: Perhaps the most worrying thing not mentioned by James McCann about the submarine announcement is that Australia…

The only true sign that the party has learned anything will be the election of a new leader

Also in The Spectator’s Notes: why clamping down on tax havens would be seen as gross interference; Jeremy Thorpe; the BBC and North Korea; Sats

It’s so depressingly predictable who gets invited to be a senior panjandrum of the quangocracy

Our camelid Gussie, now sadly dead, made an excellent intermediary

This is a way of having drugs paraphenalia without the risk of madness, criminality or losing your teeth

Also in Any Other Business: the queue to buy Tata’s British steel business; and Sadiq Khan’s inbox

Shelley’s description of Venice is one of countless vivid vignettes in Marie-Jose Gransard’s delightfully cosmopolitan literary guide

John Preston revisits the dog days of British politics when Rinka, compromising letters and conspiracy to murder were the daily headlines

But Richard Dorment, recently retired from the Daily Telegraph, claims that his taste in art was really quite cautious

Their endless sweary tirades are exhausting A.L. Kennedy’s frustrated protagonists — and also (after 500 pages) her readers

Harry Freedman’s engaging history of Bible translations includes a gay-friendly version, a Yiddish slang version and the ‘Wicked’ 1631 version with its infamous misprint

Lynsey Hanley discovers that leaving the skilled tradesman class of her birth to become middle-class and ‘respectable’ comes at a price

Blendi Fevziu describes how after 40 years’ rule ‘Uncle Enver’ left Albania the third poorest country in the world

David Hone tells us all we could ever wish to know about our favourite dinosaur in his comprehensive Tyrannosaur compendium

Let my children study Kurkov for GCSE English, says Ian Sansom (rather than the spoken language of Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay)

Why do authoritarian regimes fear metalheads? Karen Yossman goes on tour with Iron Maiden on their first visit to China to find out

Plus: at the Musée d’Orsay, how the ultimate outsider artist Douanier Rousseau became a feted insider

If Havergal Brian’s Symphony No 30 were premiered today as the work of a photogenic 25-year-old, preferably female or gay, it would cause a sensation

Plus: an amateur opera company tackle two rare comic operas Abu Hassan by Weber and Djamileh by Bizet

Richard Linklater’s latest is a bro-orgy filled with characters that Deborah Ross has no interest in spending time with

Plus: another threadbare drama from Nick Payne, this time about two gobby grans going gaga, at the Donmar Warehouse

Plus: the Roman Empire holds the key to modern Europe and what it means to be European

Plus: the latest instalment of the Hollow Crown cycle on BBC2 points to what Shakespeare would be up to if alive today – he'd be writing Game of Thrones

Born in France of Sicilian parents, Roberto Alagna has been one of the opera world’s outstanding tenors for nearly 25…

It used to be fun but she has turned it into a freak show of publicity-starved clowns

And the shits largely fall into two categories: horrid shits and entertaining shits

Without the spaniel, she’d still be sitting on the train, panting like it’s fireworks night, her head between her legs,

Last year we made a bumper profit, so stand by for 2016’s big-money winners

It’s the beginning of May and I have a feeling I am about to write the same opening sentence as…

World champion Magnus Carlsen has taken first prize in the Norway tournament at Stavanger which finished last month. Carlsen had…

White to play. This position is a variation from So-Kasparov, St Louis 2016. What is White’s quickest kill? Answers to…

In Competition No. 2947 you were asked to submit a poem in praise of old age. Old age gets a…

One clue lacks a definition part; its answer is a film title. One unclued light (three words) is the title…

SHAKESPEARE — indicating the action required to create 9, 11, 32, 18 plus 24, and the puzzle’s title — is the name…

If we don’t cut loose from the EU, nearly everywhere will end up as desperate as Clacton-on-Sea

Plus: why we Brits are simply not a tennis-playing nation

And advice on enforcing a birthday-party dress code, and tracking down a phantom pond slasher

Babington House is a mirror of Somerset that Somerset itself does not recognise or want

The new mayor of London says he’ll be ‘transparent, honest and accessible’. Such terms have an odd way of sliding