The Spectator
Australia
Sir Paul buys our magazine
Much like an excited puppy being shown around its new home, tails were wagging here at The Spectator Australia this…
Australian Features
The Argentina of the South Seas
Beware: career politicians are in the process of delivering this
Features
The anxiety-inducing world of wellness tech
I first came across the Zoe programme when a bright yellow package arrived on my parents’ doorstep last year. My…
My night with the paedo hunters
It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a paedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking…
How to roll the perfect cigarette
I recently estimated that, in my smoking life so far and at the age of 29, I have rolled 87,600…
Why I believe Lucy Letby’s trial was unfair
Even Horace Rumpole could not have secured an acquittal for Lucy Letby. The more I look at this case, the…
Are you a hotel buffet bandit?
Last week, on a Swedish train somewhere between Linkoping and Mjolby, as I struggled to open a bag of cheesy…
Will the toughest problem in maths ever be solved?
For many, not just mathematicians, the Riemann hypothesis is the very definition of a supremely difficult problem that might be…
There’s still everything to play for in America’s election
The first presidential debate of 2024 changed history by killing off Joe Biden’s career. The second presidential debate was nowhere…
Why are Chinese students giving up on architecture?
I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of…
The Week
The lessons of Grenfell
We have been told that committees will meet, urgent discussions will be held, the guilty will be punished, and steps…
A new chapter for The Spectator
For the past year or so, I’ve been involved in selling The Spectator as well as editing it. A long…
Portrait of the week: State pension to rise, prisoners released early and a new owner for The Spectator
Home The government won by 348 to 228 a Commons vote on limiting the winter fuel allowance for pensioners to those…
How to manage migration like the Swedish
In the end, the German state of Thuringia did not fall into the hands of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland…
Letters: A cautionary lesson for England’s schools
Lessons to learn Sir: Your leading article ‘Requires improvement’ (7 September) rightly raised concerns that a curriculum review in England…
Columnists
The C of E’s raving madness
In February there was a commotion at Canterbury Cathedral. Or, to be more precise, there was a silent commotion. The…
The BBC’s strange silence
In the long and illustrious history of race chancing, there must have been many more egregious examples than that of…
Is Gordon Brown back?
Last week, there was a surprise visitor to the Treasury: Gordon Brown. The former prime minister and chancellor secretly returned…
Rachel Reeves is right to cut the winter fuel payment
Gordon Brown introduced the winter fuel payment shortly after becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1997, following his party’s landslide…
Don’t look back in anger… it’s just how ticket sales work
We expect Ryanair tickets to cost more on holiday Saturdays than term-time Tuesdays and Uber fares to surge in the…
Why people would hate a property tax
My friend Tim Leunig is a cerebral thinker of the best kind. Though not party-political, he has worked for Tory…
Books
From ugly duckling into swan – the remarkable transformation of Pamela Digby
The plump teenager who married Randolph Churchill soon turned herself into a ravishing beauty – to become the 20th century’s most influential seductress
Undercover in the Dordogne: Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, reviewed
An American spy-for-hire uses her feminine wiles to infiltrate an eco-warrior group in rural France. But will she go off-piste and become indoctrinated?
The pitfalls of privilege and philanthropy: Entitlement, by Rumaan Alam, reviewed
An ambitious young black woman working for a charitable trust clashes with its white octogenarian founder over what each thinks they deserve
Man’s fraught relationship with nature extends back to prehistory
Archaeology indicates that the first migrations of hunters through Asia into the Americas and Australasia directly contributed to collapses in the Pleistocene megafauna
From tragedy to mockery: Munichs, by David Peace, reviewed
The devastating crash at Munich-Riem airport in 1959 haunts Manchester United fans to this day. Peace defies anyone to read his novel and use ‘Munichs’ as an insult ever again
The mystique of Henry V remains as powerful as ever
The belligerent young hero of Agincourt really was the model of a medieval monarch, doing the job exactly as it was supposed to be done, according to Dan Jones
The tedium of covering ‘the greatest trial in history’
The reporters who descended on Nuremberg in October 1945 included some of the century’s greatest writers. But the protracted proceedings would test their patience – and integrity
Observing nature observed: the art of Caspar David Friedrich
Friedrich’s scenes may appear to depict nature unbound, but they are also famous for their Rückenfiguren in the foreground, the men and women with their backs to us, facing what we also see
An outcast among outcasts: Katerina, by Aharon Appelfeld, reviewed
A peasant girl flees her abusive home, to find happiness working for Jewish families in the lush Carpathian countryside – until anti-Semitic pogroms change everything irrevocably
The power of mushrooms to kill or cure
Certain fungi poison not only to the animals but the trees that surround them, while others have valuable medicinal properties and can flag important changes to the ecosystem
The medieval English matriarch was a force to be reckoned with
Like many 15th-century women, Margaret Paston was a fearless protector of her family, supremely capable, in her husband’s absence, of defending their property against predatory neighbours
Arts
Tragedy and lighter things
Noni Hazlehurst’s performance in Daniel Keene’s The Mother is a thing of wonder and terror, overwhelming in its power and…
Easy-on-the-eye tosh: Netflix’s The Perfect Couple reviewed
The Perfect Couple is an exemplar of that genre sometimes cynically known as ‘poverty programming’: dramas that train all of…
When is anyone going to properly appreciate what critics have to go through?
The Critic is a period drama starring Ian McKellen as a newspaper theatre critic famed for his savagery and it…
The rise of soapy, dead-safe drama: The Band Back Together reviewed
The Band Back Together is a newish play, written and directed by Barney Norris, which succeeds wildly on its own…
How Michael Craig-Martin changed a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree
‘Of all the things I’ve drawn,’ Michael Craig-Martin reflects, ‘to me chairs are one of the most interesting.’ We are…
Elvis Costello remains the most fascinating songwriter Britain has produced in the past 50 years
Song for song, line by line, blow for blow, Elvis Costello remains the most consistently fascinating songwriter Britain has produced…
How Berlin nearly broke Bowie
This week’s Archive on 4 is a treat for David Bowie fans. Francis Whately, the producer behind several of the…
The problem with Klaus Makela
Klaus Makela is kind of a big deal. He’s a pupil of the Finnish conducting guru Jorma Panula – the…
Life
Aussie life
Cynics will say it is just a coincidence that Qantas sacked its longest-serving board member a few days after I…
Language
Strangely, the latest word Kamala Harris has chosen to apply to Donald Trump is ‘unserious’. (Or perhaps it was her…
How to find out what organisations are saying about you
Every time I have a protracted ding-dong with a big organisation, I put in a request under data protection law…
The wonder of wine from the Mosel
Conservatives used to be good at inspiring a mass membership, underpinned by organisations. Before the first world war, the Primrose…
My teenage Interrailing adventures
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna In my life I have nearly killed myself mainly with cigarettes and alcohol and dangerous journeys into…
Help! I’ve got class envy
The summer holidays were a washout as far as my children are concerned, because we had to cancel our trip…
Is protest counterproductive?
If I had my life again and was asked to choose a superpower, I’d like to come back as one…













































































