The Spectator
16 June 2018 Aus
Trump vs Nato: the trade war is becoming a security crisis
Australia
Whip out 18C
Another week, and another slap in the face from a major university to the hard-working taxpayers of mainstream Australia –…
Australian Columnists
Latham’s law
At last, there’s a break in the weather. As identity politics has swept across Australia like a crackling thunderstorm, drenching…
Australian notes
Western Civ That the Australian National University has rejected funding to establish a Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation proves how…
Brown study
The Barbarians are at it again. If it is not statues they want to desecrate, it is the names of…
Australian Features
Not our ABC
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is a $1.04 billion piece of public policy and we treat it as exactly that: a…
Letter from Penge
Australia is now unwittingly linked even more closely with the dreary outer-London suburb of Penge. Not only was it the…
Planetary perspectives
Here I am, back in Ecuador. Ecuadorians boast that the 6,310-metre high Mt Chimaborazo volcano protrudes 2,073 metres higher into…
Australia, defenceless
The ability of our armed forces to defend the nation is being crippled, not through any fault of theirs, but…
Punish Pooh-bahs, not poor people
An ancient dead white bloke, Aristotle, conceived a world with natural masters and servants, writing ‘That some should rule, and…
Canadian notes
The size of the dog in the fight Can you imagine running on a party platform or manifesto with the…
Blind to their own racism
As human beings, we often act in ways that are contradictory. Little inconsistencies are fine, but when they become major…
Features
Trump vs Nato: the trade war is becoming a security crisis
For Theresa May, the most worrying part of Donald Trump’s talks with Kim Jong-un came two days before the two…
I rented out my home. The tenants turned it into a brothel
I had been in Los Angeles for less than a month when I received the call from a concerned neighbour…
All hail Æthelflæd! The first Brexiteer
This week, Prince Edward was paying tribute to a much-loved Queen. Not ‘Mummy’ — but Queen Æthelflæd, Alfred the Great’s…
Marxism didn’t die. It’s alive and well and living among us
I remember the autumn day in 1990 when they came to cart away the large hammer and sickle outside my…
Becoming German has helped me understand Brexit
In the end, after all the waiting, the document didn’t look like much — a sheet of A4 paper adorned…
I rely on soup kitchens for food and friends
I was born in north London, at the Whittington Hospital in Archway, and at the age of 62, after many…
No wi-fi, no TV and no neighbours – staying with the Landmark Trust is bliss
About halfway across Lundy, if you’re trudging from the landing bay towards the north lighthouse, there’s a tiny holiday cottage…
The Week
There’s no going back on Brexit. But liberal policies are the way forward
This week Brexit reached its Somme. The government has been bogged down in votes on amendments inserted into its Brexit…
Portrait of the week: Theresa May dodges a Commons Brexit defeat and Donald Trump meets Kim Jong-un
Home Negotiations over Brexit acquired an even stronger admixture of chaos and old night. Phillip Lee resigned as a little-known…
To reverse the Daily Mail’s Brexit stance would be editorial suicide
Awake to the Today programme and ordure being dumped on me by Polly Toynbee while the Mail’s legendary Dame Ann…
From the archive: the future of Scandinavia
From ‘The Baltic question’, 15 June 1918: The future of Scandinavia and the Baltic must depend on the outcome of…
Australian letters
Spoilt children Sir: Re: Queens Birthday A message to the Australian Labor Party from the ordinary, decent people of this…
Doctors and deaths: how many mortalities were avoidable?
Mortal combat Health secretary Jeremy Hunt promised more protection for medical staff accused of criminal malpractice after a doctor was…
Columnists
The pressure on Theresa May is rising
Cans kicked down the road, last–minute concessions made, the process kept on track — just. This is how many people…
Justin Trudeau is far more pointless than Donald Trump
‘Trudeau or Trump?’ was a choice which Theresa May, with unusually ready wit, evaded in Parliament on Monday. No doubt…
What kills migrants on boats? The left’s good intentions
I have been scouring the internet trying to find a right-wing festival to take the family to this summer. I…
Is it ok for Muslim parents to stop their kids having non-Muslim pals?
Is it all right for the Muslim parents of children at British state schools to prevent their sons and daughters…
How to raise and train a teenage daughter
‘Dad, am I driving like a normal driver yet? Are you relaxing like a normal relaxed passenger or are you…
For Pester of TSB, like Patterson of BT, the only way is exit
Should he stay or should he go — or will he already have gone by the time you read this?…
Books
It took a long time for de Gaulle to become ‘de Gaulle’
When General de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs in 1954, he signed only four presentation copies:…
The story of the last living survivor of the Atlantic slave trade is a high adventure
Zora Neale Hurston, the African-American novelist-ethnographer, was a luminary of the New Negro Movement, later renamed by American scholars the…
The scandal of American shipping – incompetence, venality and shocking safety standards
‘We are globalisation,’ a senior executive at the shipping company Maersk told me. ‘We enable it, and we have questions…
Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There: A Novel, by D.J. Taylor, reviewed
The narrator-protagonist of D.J. Taylor’s new novel, a mild-mannered Oxford graduate named Nick Du Pont, has resisted the lure of…
Russia’s obsession with securing a warm-water port changed the history of Central Asia
In the 13th century, having overrun and terrorised Europe as far as Budapest, and in the process possibly bringing with…
American Histories, by John Edgar Wideman, reviewed
This new collection of John Edgar Wideman’s short stories comes across the pond as one of four handsomely packaged volumes…
The Shape of the Ruins, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, reviewed
What makes Colombia remind me of Ireland? It’s not only the soft rain that falls from grey skies on the…
Happy Little Bluebirds, by Louise Levene, reviewed
In 1940, the British Security Coordination sent an agent with an assistant to a Hollywood film studio to help promote…
Climbing Everest with Brian Blessed is the nearest anyone will get to encountering the yeti
In 1969 the body of an ape-like creature, preserved in ice inside an insulated box, came to light in Minnesota.…
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Colombia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever,…
The wit and wisdom of Dr Johnson is still of benefit to us all
The most irritating of recent publishing trends must be the literary self-help guide, and Henry Hitchings’s contribution to the genre…
Their Brilliant Careers: The Fantastic Lives of Sixteen Extraordinary Australian Writers, by Ryan O’Neill reviewed
Almost 120 years ago, the Australian writer Henry Lawson offered some counsel to those who came after him, writing that…
Arts
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
Why has the National given over its largest stage to one of the nation’s smallest talents?
The National has made its largest stage available to one of the nation’s smallest talents. If Brian Friel had been…
A full-on Freudian Oklahoma! at Grange Park Opera
Oh, what a beautiful morning! In Jo Davies’s production of Oklahoma! the audience spends the overture staring at the side…
Longborough continues to be a refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing idiotic productions
Longborough Festival Opera, refuge for British Wagnerians fleeing unidiomatic musical performances and idiotically irrelevant and insulting productions, has rounded off…
Exhilaratingly original, C4’s Flowers is much more than just a ‘dark comedy’
On Wednesday, BBC Four made an unexpectedly strong case that the human body is a bit rubbish. Our ill-designed spines,…
Women can now make dull formulaic franchise films too! Hurrah! Ocean’s 8 reviewed
Ocean’s 8 is the all-female spin-off of the all-male Ocean’s trilogy and it’s a sop, with a third act that…
Rod Liddle is wrong: if anything we still hear too much from male presenters on Radio 4
I don’t know which day Rod Liddle travelled down from the northeast and found nothing but women’s voices cluttering up…
The best and most extensive exhibition on Napoleon in three decades
The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best…
I don’t get why people worship Bach
I don’t get Johann Sebastian Bach. I mean, I get that he was good — no Mozart, sure, but definitely…
Michael Lewis as Rigoletto
Sir Walter Scott published The Bride of Lammermoor in 1819 as one of his hugely successful Waverley novels which captured…
Life
Here’s why not to go to the Hamptons
New York The summertime exodus is upon us. The Hamptons are overflowing with mouth-frothing groupies looking for celebrities, and the…
Donald Hankey: a remarkable – and neglected – English voice
Last year the BBC radio drama department received 3,797 scripts from hopeful authors, of which just 33 were recommended to…
It’s war in my neighbourhood – and this time it’s gloves off
After sanding floorboards for two days I became even more demented than usual. The hand sander was the exact right…
Viktor the Terrible
Viktor Korchnoi is the subject of a poignant new book from the distinguished pen of the Dutch grandmaster and former Soviet…
no. 510
Black to play. This position is from Korchnoi–-Karpov, World Championship game 17, Baguio 1978. Can you spot Karpov’s dramatic finish?…
A sonnet on it
In Competition No. 3052 you were invited to supply a sonnet inspired by a well-known contemporary figure’s characteristic feature. There…
2363: Case ending
Four of the unclued entries make up a ten-word Shakespearean quotation, including an apostrophe. The other three (two of two…
to 2360: Diplomatic
THE AMBASSADORS (1D) by HANS HOLBEIN (15 16) includes, as a MEMENTO MORI (17 27), an ANAMORPHIC (11) depiction of…
Paying women for housework? Here’s a feminist proposal I actually like
According to a new study published by some feminist academics at the Australian National University, women risk damaging their health…
As our World Cup hopes grow, let’s not fret about the brilliant Belgians
Here’s a question: name some famous Belgians. Well there’s Kevin De Bruyne, Vincent Kompany, and Eden Hazard. And if that’s…
Dear Mary: What is the correct form when you find someone hiding from you in a cupboard?
Q. Is there a tactful way to ask people with whom you’ve been interacting on an almost daily basis over…
A Soho House restaurant in Television Centre is as ghastly as it sounds: The Allis reviewed
The Allis is a restaurant inside the new Soho House at White City — it is called White City House…
When ‘activist’ used to mean ‘Nazi supporter’
Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that…
