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The Spectator

14 October 2023 Aus

Pogrom at the Opera

A vile crowd cheers the pure evil of Hamas

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Australia

Leading article Australia

We saw the darkness coming

Exactly two years and eleven months ago the cover of this magazine warned that the election the week before of…

Australian Features

Features Australia

I was the first to say the Voice would fail

My Voice prediction: I’ll have a hangover

Features Australia

Politics in the back seat

The Voice? Listen to Bess and Jacinta Price

Features Australia

Nothing modest about Chalmers’ changes

Superannuation is yet again under direct attack

Features Australia

The riddle of antisemitism

Unravelling the long history of ‘why they hate the Jews’

Features Australia

Pogrom at the Opera

A vile crowd cheers the pure evil of Hamas

Features Australia

After the Hamas deluge

Time to uproot and destroy the terrorists

Features Australia

Declaration of Independence

How the Voice could make Canberra all-powerful

Features

Features

Unholy war

What Iran gains from provoking Israel

Features

Second sight

What I learned from going blind

Features

Aftermath

A report from the Kfar Aza kibbutz

Features

Buckle up!

The state of New Hampshire doesn’t like rules

Features

‘Weaponising Jewish people is wrong’

Sadiq Khan on anti-Semitism, Ulez and the upcoming electoral battle

Features

The full English

A beginner’s guide to this country

The Week

Leading article

All that glitters

It is remarkable that in his conference speech in Liverpool, Sir Keir Starmer hardly mentioned the government’s biggest failures. There…

Columnists

Columns

The great Tory tax debate

‘I didn’t come into politics to raise taxes on working people,’ said the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in Liverpool this…

Columns

The empathy vacuum

I had a brief exchange of messages with a British Muslim bloke on social media who had asked me, very…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s notes

The pattern of Israeli/Palestinian conflicts is always forced by coverage into what people call a ‘narrative arc’. The attacks are…

Columns

I regret not having more children

Life doesn’t always work out perfectly. You can make the wrong decisions. You can leave things too late. I wish,…

Books

Lead book review

Pretending to be himself

Seamus Heaney’s letters are full of energy and joie de vivre, but a darker note persists as the pressure of celebrity grows, says Roy Foster

More from Books

Bribery and betrayal

The philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon is portrayed as a Vicar of Bray figure, all too ready to change allegiances in one of the most volatile periods of English history

More from Books

The bubble bursts

It was a born of a specific macroclimate of low interest rates following the global financial crisis – but all that is melting away and, in the case of crypto, not before time

More from Books

The crimes of Le Corbusier

We can all sympathise with his desire to end bad, ugly new building, but too many of his own projects have had to be scrapped for functional reasons

More from Books

Ravenous rats

Surprisingly for a novel riffing on Orwell’s dystopia, Julia is portrayed as a cheerful young woman uninterested in politics and believing in nothing at all

More from Books

Familiar and strange

Each story circles around events both big and small, such as lunch at a simple trattoria, a birthday party, a summer holiday or the funeral of a friend

More from Books

Making tracks

Now in her seventies, the travel writer returns to her childhood in Australia, and the trauma of losing her mother at the age of 11

More from Books

Murder by the Mississippi

When the mutilated corpse of a Ku Klux Klan member is discovered, the stability of an entire city is threatened in this tale of racial tension set beside the Mississippi

More from Books

Island queendom

Alice Albinia reminds us that Orkney was a trading station long before London, Iona the epicentre of Celtic Christianity and Shetland a haven for liberal Udal law

More from Books

All to play for

Board games especially – dating back to at least 3000 BC – have never been idle entertainment but help boost the memory and teach valuable strategic skills

More from Books

The thrill of the chase

The novelist himself admitted that his infidelities ‘produced a duality and tension that became a necessary drug for my writing’

More from Books

Out of the shadows

Unlike his attention-seeking brother David Stirling, Bill was a careful planner, responsible for many successful intelligence-gathering operations behind enemy lines

Arts

Australian Arts

This earth-shattering work

What a strange thing popular culture is. Back in the 1970s a lot of people might have affected to despise…

Theatre

Director’s cut

The unlovely Rose Theatre in Kingston is a modest three-storey eyesore. The concrete foyer looks like an exercise area on…

Radio

The Stradivarius of models

‘What advice would you give to your younger self?’ has become a popular question in interviews in recent years. It’s…

Pop

Drunk on devotion

The intimate acoustic show can denote many things for an established artist. One is that, in the infamous euphemism coined…

Cinema

Wing and a prayer

The Miracle Club, which is about a group of Irish women who travel to Lourdes, has a magnificent cast –…

Television

Beyond the cringe

Big Brother is Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten by Aldous Huxley. The detail that George Orwell got wrong is that far from…

Exhibitions

Champion of the female sex

‘She is a princess endowed with all the virtues of sex; long experience has taught her how to govern these…

Arts feature

Immaterial world

VR ‘immersion’ is everywhere in London this autumn, but is it of any value? Stuart Jeffries takes the plunge

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

The plight of indigenous people is a scab on our nation which worsens with the picking. No one, not even…

Aussie Life

Language

Noel Pearson and others have insisted the Voice referendum ‘is not about race’. Does that make sense linguistically? The word…

Food

Revised Criterion

There are cursed restaurants and cursed women, and this makes them no less interesting. One is Maxim’s in Paris, which…

More from life

Corned beef pie

A few weeks ago I was at the super-market juggling a toddler, several heavy bags and, it transpired, no pound…

Spectator sport

Bend it like Biles

Has there ever been an athlete, male or female, quite like Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all time? She…

No sacred cows

For deer life

In spite of my dodgy right hand – caused by an injury to my radial nerve – I decided to…

Competition

Pleasure principle

In Competition No. 3320 you were invited to submit a poem extolling Epicureanism over Stoicism or the other way round.…