The destruction of Bronwyn Bishop’s career stands as a stain of shame on this parliament. The entire affair exposes the…

Over the last year or so I have been trying to catch up on two aspects of modern culture that…

Using the courts to sabotage mining

Far from being a disaster, the Brownyn scandal may be a boon for Tony Abbott

The Left have so successfully stereotyped the Right, that now they believe it themselves

Moving Q&A to the news division will only make the bias worse

The Australian parliamentary system is blocking much-needed

Well, you did read it here first...

There’s hardly an industry or a part of the world that isn’t counting on China to keep growing strongly. Soon, that could be a big problem

There are real reasons to worry about Libya Dawn – but also real reasons to try to work with them

Agents are essential to the fight against terrorism. But our gratitude sometimes seems to come with an expiry date

It’s not enough to succeed, Gore Vidal said: others must fail — a maxim that works a hundred times better when Australia do the failing

Ed Miliband fuelled the left’s ‘great betrayal’ myth – and his changes to the party’s voting system look disastrous

Parliaments exist to inject hesitation and circumspection into the legislative process

To use the term, we feel, would imply that we have too much respect for ourselves, that we take ourselves too seriously

The devastated city she loved and left now has Germany’s largest population of millionaires

We don't have the capacity to fund a worldwide health service – pretending otherwise just imposes a needless burden on both the NHS and the taxpayer

Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from…

Plus: the Vegemite panic and the nostalgic appeal of Jeremy Corbyn

Plus: a Twitter snapshot of the Labour leadership struggle; how much sleep Britain gets; missing planes

If you want to make it to the top, sometimes you’re going to need patience

From ‘What will they do with it?’, The Spectator, 14 August 1915: It is true that in a good many cases…

End of Entitlements Sir: Having read David Flint’s article on parliamentary “entitlements” (Bronny bad, Adam goodes, Spectator Aust, 8 Aug.)…

The leadership candidates are debating plenty of things – but not how to appeal to the southern and Ukip voters they need for power

All traces of the celebrations have been cleared away. Were it not for my new Stetson, I might wonder if it had all really happened

A ludicrous hoax trend that almost makes me pity its enthusiasts

Plus: France’s gift to English taxpayers; and the case for charitable maniacs

My Life with Wagner is the conductor’s perceptive and impassioned account of his lifelong devotion to one of the world’s greatest — and most controversial — composers

Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic — both mystery story and thoughtful enquiry into the nature of artistic inspiration — will delight fans of Donna Tartt, John Fowles and The Prisoner

Ida Perkins is alarmingly convincing as the unknown genius of 20th-century American poetry in Muse, Galassi’s lively fiction debut

Henrietta Leyser’s brisk journey through the seven kingdoms of Dark Age Britain centres on the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian monk who famously wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People while remaining entirely cloistered for 60 years

Described by his biographer David Jackson as ‘the major figure of all time in Latin American literature’, the 19th-century Brazilian novelist has been unjustly neglected in the English-speaking world

The highly gifted Freeman emerges a very odd, elusive fish from Hugh Purcell’s dogged biography, written without its subject’s co-operation

New York’s contemporary gay community is the setting for Hanya Yanaghira’s controversial A Little Life — but this vast novel highlights in general the ‘unfreedom’ of life in the free world

When Christopher Pyne’s A Letter to My Children was launched, a bunch of radical students mounted a violent demonstration. The…

On release people had to be bribed to watch it, but Andy Warhol’s Empire has cast a long shadow

Plus: Carlos Acosta gets his kit off in Cubiana at the Royal Opera House

The clocks and the costumes make Michael Tanner want to climb up on stage

To say that this film lacks the courage of its convictions doesn’t get near it — I’m not sure it had any in the first place

Plus: jumbled heads, limbs and torsos at the John Soane Museum: Drawn from the Antique reviewed

Ukip! The Musical makes a hero of Farage, while Boris: World King will be lucky to make the West End with the talented David Benson still on board

Plus: why does British self-deprecation sound so like boasting?: Channel 4’s Very British Problems reviewed

Plus: the World Service’s slick Inquiry into talking to Isis

‘I Love a Piano’ sang Fred Astaire and Judy Garland, courtesy of Irving Berlin, in Easter Parade. So do most…

But further east, poor craggy Aegean islands are having it far, far worse

It started calmly enough but then all hell broke loose on my three-night dog-sit

It took two years of effort to reach Effort Street, and all I got was a wad of paperwork

Tony Blair’s cavorting with a right-wing billionaire mired in scandal epitomises what the Labour party is now trying to leave behind

I hadn’t realised quite what a thriving bridge scene Manchester has until spending a weekend there recently. I went with…

Jonathan Hawkins has emerged as the winner of this year’s British Championship, which finished last week at the University of…

Black to play. This is a variation from Osborne-Hawkins, British Championship, Coventry 2015. Black is a piece down. What is…

In Competition No. 2910 you were invited to submit a poem by a pet who is cheesed off with its…

The unclued lights (two of two words), individually or as pairs, are of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.  …

The unclued lights are heraldic terms. First prize Simon Horobin, Kidlington, Oxon Runners-up Mick O’Halloran, Dunsborough, Australia; John Roberts, Cheltenham,…

As a realist, I don’t have the luxury of certainty – but I’d rather be on Harry Truman’s side

Communism might be able to build a boring bridge, but it could never have created Red Bull

Plus: the mounting costs of having children’s school friends to stay; and how to probe politely about the neighbours’ party

I can understand why restaurants go easy on the garlic. But they shouldn’t

How a seeker of knowledge became a finder and destroyer of forbidden things