Where the United Nation’s tends to wallow in popstar navel-gazing, climate change self-flagellation and tedious bouts of Israel-bashing, it is…

No wonder so many Australians, from those with modest incomes to the very rich, now prefer to satisfy their compulsory…

Right and proper that generous tributes are paid at a memorial service, even if sometimes undeserved or exaggerated. But what…

‘Australia – love it and leave it’ says my t-shirt. The good news is that kindly sponsors are flying me…

Fifteen years ago ordinary Australians gave a two-fingered salute to the nation’s inner-city elites

An exit from the EU could bring Britain and Australia closer than ever before

Thanks to globalisation, ‘progressive’ politicians have nowhere to turn

What’s happened to my party?

This ought to concern the left. But they’re too worried about making ‘moral judgments’

The dirty business of kidnapping, and other IS money-making schemes

It’s time to take a stand against the absurd, patronising drive for ‘accessibility’

The people Klansmen seem to hate most are each other

This brainy festival is fast becoming a part of Ireland’s popular culture

I didn't exactly mean to go there. But if you like your history with a bit of war, there's nowhere more fascinating

At last we have an Archbishop of Canterbury who is a voice of reason, intelligence and authority

Home The government, expecting a backbench rebellion over the European Arrest Warrant, did not present it for a separate vote…

Plus: Being hypnotised into liking maths, and the wonder of my daughter’s third word

Plus: Who’s taken away on European arrest warrants, and the figures on payday loans and sandwiches

We don’t, as far as the Greeks are concerned, really do politics; we just elect people to do it for us

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 14 November 1914: We must make no attempt to conceal the terrible character…

The state of Italy… Sir: Ambassador Terracciano’s letter (Letters, 1 November) about Nicholas Farrell’s article (‘The dying man of Europe’,…

But Ukip still has a big challenge ahead

The time to stop these maniacs is when they’re trying to come back into the country – not when they’re leaving

The internet is a frighteningly efficient place for hunter-gathering – but the pleasures of undirected browsing are harder to find online

There’s a great gulf between saying you shouldn’t do something and saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do something

We have nothing, not even high-season Blackpool, not even the great financial casino of Canary Wharf, that begins to resemble this

Plus choices from Mark Amory, A.N. Wilson, Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Roger Lewis, Jonathan Mirsky, Jeremy Clarke, Stephen Walsh, Ferdinand Mount, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Wynn Wheldon, Stephen Bayley, Jonathan Rugman, Alan Judd, Patrick Marnham, Richard Davenport-Hines, Michela Wrong, Byron Rogers, Sofka Zinovieff and Andrew Taylor

A review of Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom, by Simon Barnes. Avoiding all anthropocentrism, the book proceeds by interlocking the most sophisticated life-forms with the most simple

It all ends well though. A review of Life, Love and the Archers; Recollections, Reviews and Other Prose, by Wendy Cope

A roundup of recent crime fiction takes in Phil Rockman's Night After Night, Chris Ewan's Dark Tides, Andrew Williams's The Suicide Club and Peter James's A Twist of the Knife

A review of Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, by Geoffrey Parker. This is a masterpiece of historical biography

A review of Elsa Schiaparelli, by Meryle Secrest, and Vivienne Westwood, by Vivienne Westwood and Ian Kelly. There's some trendy guff in Westwood's autobiography. But Haslam finds more to love in the caring Westwood than in the cruel Schiap

A review of Some Luck, by Jane Smiley. The Pulitzer-prize winner captures the strange beauty of mortal life

A review of Taking Command, by General David Richards, with a foreword by Max Hastings. A model four-star general takes us through his 40 years in the British army

A review of Not My Father's Son, by Alan Cumming. It's an autobiography that pits a kindly grandfather against a cruel father

A review of Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, by Frances Lanson. A grimly amusing and possibly definitive survey of a disquieting subject

A review of Lingo, by Gaston Dorren. A series of quirky linguistic stories full etymological pleasures

A review of The Old Vic: The Story of a Great Theatre from Kean to Olivier to Spacey, by Terry Coleman, and Closely Observed Theatre: From the National to the Old Vic, by Jonathan Croall. Where's the critical thinking?

A review of A Tour of Bones, by Denise Inge. A wise, fresh and brutally frank tour of Europe's charnel-houses

A review of The Fires of Autumn, by Irène Némirovsky, translated by Sandra Smith. It's the last of Nemirovsky's wartime novels to be translated into English and is better read as a draft

Answer: Georges Perec. And it shows in his writing. A review of Portrait of a Man, by Georges Perec, translated and with an introduction by David Bellos

It takes a certain type of courage for a writer to complete a book and then admit that he does…

The Marmite ballerina retires next year. Ismene Brown talks to her about legs, boobs and changing people’s lives

When it comes to realistic portraiture, Moroni was even greater than Titian - as this Royal Academy exhibition shows

There was much bravery in his trampling of early 20th-century taboos, says Nicky Haslam

Plus: let’s not restrict the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to Jacobean bloodbaths like ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Let’s stage gigs there too

Plus: an Autumn round-up including charismatic collaborations between Israel Galvan and Akram Khan, and duds from the Royal Ballet

Turing died for his sexuality, yet here we don't see him even touch another man

Plus: Michael Tanner accepts the strangeness of Donizetti’s Les Martyrs, but is it any good?

Plus: Frank Cottrell Boyce goes in search of the girls of Gretna Green who manufactured cordite during the war

James Delingpole is proud that Britain will do anything rather than admit it’s finished as a fighting nation

Jane Turner is to play a mother with a difficult daughter. No, it’s not a stage version of Kath &…

I sat next to his Giacometti’s ‘Chariot’ every 5 March for 40 years

The place was a disappointment and I was a disappointment to myself

People have lost the art of listening

And before it became a centre of Bohemian decadence akin to the Weimar Republic

It's reckoning time. We're comfortably up. Now for next year...

It’s always good to know where you draw the line and my line, drawn in thick black ink, was going…

The common feature of the first two games of the World Championship match between Viswanathan Anand and Magnus Carlsen in…

Black to play. This position is a variation from Anand-Carlsen; World Championship, Sochi (Game 1) 2014. Can you spot Black’s…

In Competition No. 2873 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of a well-known building. It…

Each unclued light is somehow related to a clued one. Elsewhere, ignore an acute accent.   Across   4   …

The unclued are locations on SKYE, ‘The Misty Isle’ (solutions at 15 and 31). ISLE does double duty in 15/31…

Neil Lyndon was hounded out of polite society. Islamists are treated rather more gently

The reception for the first major nation to come back here will be fantastic. The whole region will benefit

Take a tip from John Betjeman. Plus: foraging etiquette

Lopesan Costa Melonoras Resort Spa and Casino is in Spain, but the timing is German. It exudes gloom. It smells of peas

Incident as something that simply happens has been in use since before Defoe’s time. But it has meanings unsought by managers of building sites