The Spectator
15 April 2017 Aus
The Benedict option
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
Diversity’s hypocrites Let’s say that you’re a ‘diversity’ freak. What you want in life is to take some group X,…
Terrorism diary
Tommy Robinson, Caolan Robertson and I were filming in a Chelsea studio for Rebel Media. We were recording videos about…
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
Sophie’s bad choices
The ABC’s Jerusalem correspondent seems to have odd priorities
Lost in the enchanted forest
Victoria’s Labor government can’t, er, see the wood for the trees
Reforming Islam
The Koran was placed on the highest possible level in my household. It was a mark of awe that the…
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…
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…
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
Putin’s Syria problem
For Vladimir Putin, Syria has been the gift that kept on giving. His 2015 military intervention propelled Russia back to…
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…
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…
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…
The Benedict option
Hannah Roberts, an English Catholic friend, was once telling me about her family’s long history in Yorkshire. She spoke with…
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…
Frank Matcham
Go inside the Everyman Theatre, Cheltenham, preferably when it is empty. Look round. Look up. And there it is, with…
The Week
Osborne and the Athenians
As a result of George Osborne taking up five jobs on top of his role as MP for Tatton, an…
Parting on good terms
Many EU officials would like to present the Brexit negotiations as a case of one nervous member, weak at the…
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
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…
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…
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…
Give me the Anglican option
The Algerian government’s official tourist guide describes ‘the walled town of Beni Isguen — normally closed to foreigners — where…
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
Each Easter, I think of David Jones (1895-1974). He was a distinguished painter and, I would (though unqualified) say, a…
Books
A true original
Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron…
Romancing the stones
If Britain’s prehistoric monuments have had a magnetic attraction for generations of artists, it is perhaps because they have long…
Neither green nor pleasant
The old coaching inn on the green. The Sunday morning toll of church bells. The ducklings paddling on the pond.…
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…
Bones of contention
A few years ago, a group of Native American leaders drove 12 hours from Oklahoma to Denver Museum of Nature…
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…
Too young to die
In the north transept of Westminster Abbey, there is a memorial by Joseph Nollekens to three British captains killed at…
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
Country pleasures
The English weren’t the first cowpat composers. Jean-Philippe Rameau raised the art of frolicking in the fields to such heights…
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…
First Bourne
‘Modern’ dance was no laughing matter in 1987. Harold King, director of the now-defunct London City Ballet, cattily typified it…
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’…
Seeking closure
The Sense of an Ending is an adaptation of Julian Barnes’s 2011 Man Booker prize-winning novel starring Jim Broadbent (we…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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
2305: Whodunnit?
The unclued lights (one of two words) can be resolved into three associated trios which are not the solution to…
to 2302: Urbane turban
The twelve undefined solutions become one Scottish and eleven English towns, if the final letter is omitted or a letter…
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…
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,…
What makes players popular?
What a treat to be Sergio Garcia. Not only have you just won your first major and trousered a small…
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…
Presidential panic
This month, watch out for unidentified fleeing presidents. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of Fidé, the World Chess Federation, and a self-confessed…
no. 452
White to play. This position is from Euwe-Fischer, New York 1957. White has two winning moves in this position. Can…
Dear John
In Competition No. 2992 you were invited to submit a Dear John letter, in prose or verse, in the style…






























































