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The Spectator

16 December 2023 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Massacre of innocence

The Massacre of the Innocents is the story told in the New Testament (but only in one of the Gospels),…

Diary Australia

Christmas Diary

We’re home for the holidays. My wife insists: ‘We live in a resort!’ The neighbour’s roof is in front of…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Taking back New Zealand

A new government breaks from old habits

Features Australia

Days of empire lost

What hope for the snowflake generation?

Features Australia

Şapdağ girl

Beauty lost in the silica mines

Features Australia

The UN’s rotten roots

The behaviour of Secretary-General Guterres is a disgrace

Features Australia

Hollywood’s unhappy ending

Blockbuster budgets are destroying creativity

Features Australia

Israel and the ten per cent

Those who oppose Israel oppose our very essence

Features Australia

The coming chaos

Welcome to our rendezvous with destiny - the Fourth Turning

Features Australia

Two-state solution is no solution

‘Free Palestine’ demonstrators really just support Hamas

Features

Books

Australian Books

Summer Books

Some very good, and a few astonishingly bad

More from Books

The bald truth about Patrick Stewart

The actor best known for his role as Star Trek’s Captain Picard comes across as pompous, chippy and point-scoring as he reminisces about directors and fellow stars

More from Books

Andy Warhol would have revelled in the chaos of his legacy

Having signed fake screenprints as his own, Warhol left his work open to questionable rulings by an authentication board, causing collectors much frustration and expense

More from Books

Surprise package: Tackle!, by Jilly Cooper, reviewed

Rupert Campbell-Black (‘still Nirvana to most women’) decides to buy a football club – to the amazement of Rutshire, and no doubt Cooper’s devoted readers

More from Books

The popularity of ‘Amazing Grace’ owes much to its melody

The song has evolved from Christian hymn to secular anthem for humankind. But the powerful tune we know today was not its original one

More from Books

The invisible boundaries of everyday life

Maxim Samson investigates cultural or imaginary demarcations around the world, including the International Date Line, America’s Bible Belt and the Jewish eruvim

More from Books

Nothing satisfies Madonna for very long

Her ‘rebel’ life, as told by Mary Gabriel, has been a frenzied churn of friends, lovers, mentors and collaborators, vital to her for a year or two and then discarded

More from Books

Seeing the dark in a new light

Even in the deepest mineshaft we’re surrounded by light we can’t see, explains Jacqueline Yallop, drawing on quantum physics to help dispel ordinary night terrors

More from Books

What convinces Jeremy Corbyn that ‘there is a poet in all of us’?

‘Nobody should ever be afraid of sharing their poetry’, he says, in an anthology co-edited with Len McCluskey. But, judging by his own offering, afraid is what we should be

More from Books

The horrors of dining with a Roman emperor

Elagabalus’s suffocating party tricks may have been exaggerated, but Domitian’s sinister, death-themed feasts could be seen as a dictator’s flamboyant threat

Lead book review

Will the Caucasus ever be tamed?

Its ruined fortresses, broken monasteries and deserted villages attest to centuries of conflict, and any idea of a united Caucasus remains a dream, says Christoph Baumer

Life

Aussie Life

Language

They keep doing this to us. Those kids keep inventing new words of obscure origin, and of even obscurer meaning.…

Aussie Life

Aussie life

‘Oh sweetheart,’ I smiled lovingly at my four-week-old, Teddy, one night at 3am, while changing his nappy, ‘would you please…

Quiz

The Spectator’s 2023 Christmas quiz

Fairly odd 1. What had for 50 years been the name for Fanta Pineapple & Grapefruit before it was changed…