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The Spectator

15 April 2017 Aus

The Benedict option

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Christ almighty?

Last week, Egypt declared a state of emergency. Twin bombings of churches that were packed for Palm Sunday services killed…

Australian Columnists

Australian Notes

Australian notes

Diversity’s hypocrites Let’s say that you’re a ‘diversity’ freak. What you want in life is to take some group X,…

Diary Australia

Terrorism diary

Tommy Robinson, Caolan Robertson and I were filming in a Chelsea studio for Rebel Media. We were recording videos about…

Guest notes

Trumpian notes

My phone rings; a name flashes across the screen. Giorgio. ‘It’s done,’ he says in his husky Greek accent. With…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Sophie’s bad choices

The ABC’s Jerusalem correspondent seems to have odd priorities

Features Australia

Lost in the enchanted forest

Victoria’s Labor government can’t, er, see the wood for the trees

Features Australia

Reforming Islam

The Koran was placed on the highest possible level in my household. It was a mark of awe that the…

Features Australia

Conservatives and universities

Belatedly, the Left’s capture of our universities is attracting some attention. Not enough, of course, but it’s a start after…

Features Australia

The curious case of third wave feminists

The third-wave feminist is a curious creature. Her comrades are a strange sub-strata of Millennial and Generation X women with…

Features Australia

Labor voters’ choice? Tony.

Tony Abbott is a ‘very good human being’, ‘his decency quite impossible to overlook’, declares the ALP eminence, Graham Richardson.…

Features

Features

Putin’s Syria problem

For Vladimir Putin, Syria has been the gift that kept on giving. His 2015 military intervention propelled Russia back to…

Features

Do you know a flake fatale?

It was the third time in a row that she had cancelled our date for drinks. The first time she’d…

Features

Bias and the BBC

Last week, Nick Robinson wrote an article in the Radio Times saying Radio 4’s Today programme no longer has an…

Features

Side-saddle is sexy

These days there are more than 1,000 members of the Side Saddle Association. Well, of course there are. People go…

Features

The Benedict option

Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with…

Features

Trump, the emptiest mind

Howard Jacobson awoke to the news of Trump’s victory in November. He had no newspaper column so, what could he…

Elegant and gilded: the Everyman in Cheltenham

Features

Frank Matcham

Go inside the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, preferably when it is empty. Look round. Look up. And there it is, with…

The Week

Ancient and modern

Osborne and the Athenians

As a result of George Osborne taking up five jobs on top of his role as MP for Tatton, an…

Barometer

Barometer

Cabin fodder British Airways proposes to stop serving free meals on long-haul flights. — Although passengers once took it for…

Diary

Diary

Don’t get old! Everything takes so long – it’s an hour to get down to breakfast. And I’m not only…

Leading article

Parting on good terms

Many EU officials would like to present the Brexit negotiations as a case of one nervous member, weak at the…

Letters

Letters

On Pamela Harriman Sir: When it comes to grandes horizontales and naughty girls, I defer to Taki (High Life, 8…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week

Home Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, having cancelled a trip to Moscow over the Syrian poison gas incident, consulted other…

Columnists

Rod Liddle

What message do Trump’s missiles really send?

Let me take this opportunity to join with our Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in commending President Trump’s swift and…

Any other business

A whistleblower mystery that illuminates the inner turmoil of the banking sector

What troubled places banks have become, I thought as I listened to two news stories, one concerning a formal reprimand…

Mary Wakefield

Who dares face down the teenage gangsters?

The baby, unbothered by diesel fumes, enjoys an outing down the main road through London N1. Each passing bus is…

Matthew Parris

Give me the Anglican option

The Algerian government’s official tourist guide describes ‘the walled town of Beni Isguen — normally closed to foreigners — where…

World Politics

If Trump’s listening to his generals, that’s great news for Britain

‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and not yet found a role’. Fifty-five years on, Dean Acheson’s remark has not…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s notes

Each Easter, I think of David Jones (1895-1974). He was a distinguished painter and, I would (though unqualified) say, a…

Books

Lead book review

A true original

Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron…

Turner’s Stonehenge is strewn with the bodies of sheep and their shepherd, victims of an electrical storm

Books

Romancing the stones

If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long…

Books

Neither green nor pleasant

The old coaching inn on the green. The Sunday morning toll of church bells. The ducklings paddling on the pond.…

Books

A gaping hole in the week

This is a gem of a book for Radio 4 lovers, particularly those of us who work out which day…

Books

Bones of contention

A few years ago, a group of Native American leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma to Denver Museum of Nature…

Books

An eye for sensationalism

According to Private Eye, executives at the Daily Mail were alarmed by the impending publication of Adrian Addison’s new history…

‘The Death of Lord Robert Manners’ by Thomas Stothard

Books

Too young to die

In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at…

A computer illustration of people in cryogenic pods

Books

No end in sight

Are you a deathist? A deathist is someone who accepts the fact of death, who thinks the ongoing massacre of…

Arts

Opera

Country pleasures

The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights…

Culture Buff

David Hockney inside the exhibition at NGV

The impressive David Hockney Show which closed recently at the NGV, having attracted big crowds, will have left no one…

This is England: Paris Fitzpatrick and Daniel Collins in ‘Town and Country’ from ‘Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures’

Dance

First Bourne

‘Modern’ dance was no laughing matter in 1987. Harold King, director of the now-defunct London City Ballet, cattily typified it…

Architectural Mecca: Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, by Le Corbusier

Arts feature

Concrete cuckoo

The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council provides a salutary example of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’ practices on the ‘non-elite’…

We love, love, love her: Charlotte Rampling as Veronica in ‘The Sense of an Ending’

Cinema

Seeking closure

The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we…

Frankly dreadful: ‘The Renaissance of Venus’, 1877, by Walter Crane

Exhibitions

The good, the indifferent and the simply awful

‘There is only one thing worse than homosexual art,’ the painter Patrick Procktor was once heard to declare at a…

Radio

Tales of the unexpected

It’s the oddest place to find a profound meditation on the death of Christ, but there it is on Radio…

Television

Look back in anger

‘What we really need is a faux-historical drama series about police brutality and black activism set in 1970s London,’ said…

Music

The decade the music died

For much of the past half-century, London has been the world’s orchestral capital. Not always in quality, but numerically without…

Theatre

Law in action

It’s like Raging Bull. The great Scorsese movie asks if a professional boxer can exclude violence from his family life.…

Life

Crossword

2305: Whodunnit?

The unclued lights (one of two words) can be resolved into three associated trios which are not the solution to…

Crossword solution

to 2302: Urbane turban

The twelve undefined solutions become one Scottish and eleven English towns, if the final letter is omitted or a letter…

Food

Jamie’s latest plank

Barbecoa is Jamie Oliver’s new restaurant on Piccadilly, and no matter how many times I mutter the name, I do…

High life

High life

Things that I once loved — Fifth Avenue & 57th Street, brownstone terraces on hot summer afternoons, cold beer and…

Low life

Low life

I ran for the airport terminal shuttle bus; the doors shut behind me as I skipped on. I sank into…

Mind your language

King Charles’s head

‘It has become something of a King Charles’ head, or should that be a King Charles’s head?’ said my husband,…

Real life

Real life

Some people get into the choosing of tap fittings. I am not a person who gets into the choosing of…

Spectator sport

What makes players popular?

What a treat to be Sergio Garcia. Not only have you just won your first major and trousered a small…

Status anxiety

Why Parcs life is not for me

Against my better judgment, I agreed to go to Center Parcs for an Easter weekend break. We chose the one…

The turf

The turf

Every Grand National reminds me of a hero of my youth: Beltrán Alfonso Osorio y Díez de Rivera, the 18th…

Bridge

Bridge

Bridge 24 was set up seven years ago by four Polish internationals who wanted to bring the glory days of…

Chess

Presidential panic

This month, watch out for unidentified fleeing presidents. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of Fidé, the World Chess Federation, and a self-confessed…

Chess puzzle

no. 452

White to play. This position is from Euwe-Fischer, New York 1957. White has two winning moves in this position. Can…

Competition

Dear John

In Competition No. 2992 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. My aunt lives in a small market town with narrow roads and limited parking. A neighbour opposite acquired a…