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The Spectator

16 August 2025 Aus

Wreckognition

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Wreckognition

There are very few words in the English language that adequately describe the treachery and lack of moral integrity of…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Cowards die many times before their death

Weak conservative leadership is the unkindest cut of them all

Features Australia

Being the good one

On the politics of self-righteousness

Features Australia

Jim’s Peronist Jamboree

Australia’s productivity going down the gurgler

Features Australia

Gone to Gough

The return of socialist Australia

Features Australia

‘Immigration is killing Europe’

Trump’s warning ten years after Merkel opened the floodgates

Features Australia

Albo’s Elmer Fudd diplomacy

Labor gifts Hamas a propaganda victory

Features Australia

Red ruin

Overcapacity is the new Covid

Features Australia

Reef(er) madness

The media peddle unscientific nonsense

Features Australia

The real genocide against Muslims

Media becoming propaganda arm of Hamas terrorists

Features

Features

Labour’s new ‘dark arts’ strategy

Senior Labour figures have given up hope of beating Nigel Farage in 2029. There are two causes for this pessimism.…

Features

Can Reform beat the blob?

Shortly after he was elected as Britain’s youngest council leader last month, 19-year-old George Finch of Reform UK had a…

Features

Why do so many of us want to be alone?

When was the last time you had a truly classic racist cab driver? Mine was a few years ago, coming…

Features

Why is sport so obsessed with Goats?

It was late at night in rural France and Martin wanted to discuss Goats. And he didn’t mean livestock. ‘You…

Features

Europe is giving up on free movement

Ten years ago on 31 August 2015, Angela Merkel told the German press what she was going to do about…

Features

How Princess Anne is celebrating her 75th birthday

When a previous milestone was looming in the life of Princess Anne, her 21st birthday, the late Queen asked her…

Notes on...

Down with exclamation marks!

Punctuation is a gendered thing. I’ve been trying to stop myself overusing exclamation marks and it’s been difficult. Exclamation marks…

Features

The real reason Trump’s Alaska summit matters

Donald Trump has never lacked confidence. ‘I’m here to get the thing over with,’ he said last week when announcing…

Features

Trump’s Alaska meeting is a gift for Putin 

From the Kremlin’s point of view, holding a US-Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska is an idea of fiendish brilliance. The…

The Week

Ancient and modern

The Romans would have been baffled by the Gaza protests

Why are people in the UK protesting about the situation in Gaza? Surely it should be because the helpless Gazans…

Barometer

How many organisations are proscribed in the UK?

Mind your manors US Vice-President J.D. Vance is holidaying in an £8,000-a-week manor house near Charlbury in the Cotswolds. What…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Palestine Action arrests, interest rate cuts and an Alaska meeting

Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, said: ‘The Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is…

Diary

Don’t believe the doomsday talk about London

It is one of the joys of sport that friendships forged in changing rooms and on playing fields can be…

Leading article

Britain is broke – and we all need to face it

Sometimes when I go to bed, I think that if I were a young man I would emigrate,’ said James…

Letters

Letters: Nigel Farage’s biggest weakness

Bad friend Sir: Tim Shipman’s examination of Reform’s success in attracting female voters contains an important warning for Nigel Farage…

Columnists

Any other business

What is there to be optimistic about for British business?

In this season of scant corporate news – a Ryanair rant against the French here, a new BP oilfield there…

Columns

Of course shoplifters are scumbags

A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without…

Columns

Clive of India must not fall

The only MP I have ever really wanted to marry is Thangam Debbonaire. The former Labour MP for Bristol West…

The Spectator's Notes

Who still supports Keir Starmer?

Successful political leaders hold in their minds some idea of what Mrs Thatcher called ‘Our People’. In this context, I…

Columns

Give J.D. Vance a glimpse of real Britain

We’re used to strange sights in north Oxfordshire. The first person I ever met in our small Cotswolds town was…

Columns

Has Zelensky become a liability?

Is Volodymyr Zelensky becoming a liability for the West and for his own country? We are entitled at least to…

Books

More from Books

The woman I’m not – Nicola Sturgeon

Scotland’s former first minister spends most of her memoir telling us how different she is from her public image

More from Books

Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed

Social, moral, architectural and linguistic problems collide in this gem of a novel set in lightly altered contemporary Tokyo

More from Books

The enduring pathos of Wound Man

The medieval surgical diagram evolves over centuries into an internationally recognised image, offering a striking portrayal of human suffering, love of detail and medical knowledge

More from Books

How can Gwyneth Paltrow bear so much ridicule?

The frail-looking movie star turns out to surprisingly thick-skinned as well as shrewd: a curious combination of entrepreneurial survivor and woo-woo artiste

More from Books

Deception by stealth: the scammer’s long game

Swindled out of almost $100,000, Johnathan Walton warns of the insidious strategies lasting years of the really determined con artist

More from Books

The AI apocalypse is the least of our worries

A host of other catastrophes are far more likely to destroy the planet, including solar storms, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, biowarfare and even asteroid strike

More from Books

Campus antics: Seduction Theory, by Emily Adrian, reviewed

Two creative writing professors in a ‘deeply rewarding’ marriage separately decide to press the self-destruct button

More from Books

The scourge of the sensitivity reader

A comparatively new figure with no accredited expertise now dictates to literary agents, senior editors and award-winning authors

More from Books

The spiritual journey of St Augustine

Christians should consider themselves ‘peregrini’, said Augustine, and his life on the periphery of the Roman empire taught him that we are all citizens of nowhere

More from Books

What the Quran has to say about slavery

While it attaches high moral value to emancipation, it acknowledges the legitimacy of slavery and the sexual exploitation of woman – justifying forced concubinage by certain Islamic regimes

Arts

Australian Films

Shaggy dog tale

I thought it would be impossible to make a bad film about a dog but the production team for The…

Pop

Ultimately hard to resist: Elbow reviewed

Our relationships with bands are often very like our relationships with people. Some are pure and lasting love. Some start…

The Listener

Disconcerting but often delightful new Bach transcriptions

Grade: B Everyone loves the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Rather fewer people love the sound of an unaccompanied organ,…

Cinema

Woody Allen without the zingers: Materialists reviewed

Celine Song’s first film, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists.…

Television

I love how awful My Oxford Year is

The punters are saying My Oxford Year is a disaster. ‘Predictable, uninspiring and laughable,’ complains some meanie on Rotten Tomatoes.…

Classical

The rise of cringe

No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. ‘This music is top-quality trash,’ proclaims his 1993…

Theatre

The problem with psychiatrists? They’re all depressed

Edinburgh seems underpopulated this year. The whisky bars are half full and the throngs of tourists who usually crowd the…

Arts feature

How the railways shaped modern culture

Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to…

Exhibitions

Modest, interesting – no masterpieces: Millet at the National Gallery reviewed

Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

A strange thing happened recently on a bright and peaceful Sunday morning in Bleak City, aka the once-great Melbourne. I…

Aussie Life

Language

The online world breeds some very strange bits of language, and none are stranger than the word ‘catfishing’. This names…

Food

‘Italian that just works’: Broadwick Soho reviewed

This column sometimes shrieks the death of central London, and this is unfair. (I think this because others are now…

No sacred cows

Wormwood Scrubs, my deserted little bit of paradise

On the face of it, Wormwood Scrubs is not particularly appealing. I don’t mean the prison, but the common in…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: how can I set my daughter up with a nice young man?

Q. I am soon to entertain a house party on a sporting estate. We took the same house last year…

Sport

Nothing can save Test cricket

Forgive me if I don’t join the general ‘Make mine a treble’ hoo-ha about the future of Test cricket after…

Mind your language

Does Canopus have a connection with canopy?

I spent some time looking for the connection between the ancient city of Canopus and the English canopy. Nelson won…

Crossword

2716: Cluelessness

Eight entries – only four of which comprise one word – possess titular properties. Across 11    Playful killer whales swimming,…

Competition

Spectator Competition: Hard lines

For Competition 3412 you were invited to submit a poem about the struggle of writing a poem.This challenge drew a…

Still Life

Medics make the worst patients

Provence Apart from three Covid years, the German rock cover band Five and the Red One (named, so they say,…

Real life

My angry Fairy Liquid battle

‘Please do NOT wash up!’ reads the makeshift sign I have fixed above the kitchen sink. It instructs our B&B…

The turf

The unorthodox appeal of the Shergar Cup

With DJs and MCs inviting the crowd to dance on the parade-ring steps as if they were on a beach…