Some gags you can’t get enough of, and the suggestion by Mark Latham and others that the astonishing success of…

Even in parliament, fashions change. I am not referring to the width of lapels, the length of dresses, the style…

It is not the easiest thing in the world to cause a stir among conservatives. They are often described as…

Having turned 80 last month and 12 years out of office, Australia’s 25th Prime Minister John Winston Howard’s occasional and…

Hollywood blockbusters are not normally the place one finds insight, but a new action thriller recently provided an unexpected reflection…

If you were to believe some politicians and journalists, the recent mass killings in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New…

Senator Pat Dodson, often called the ‘father of reconciliation’, said last week that political leaders had failed to reconcile with…

Is it time for Australia to legislate for a minimalist bill of rights? Now, before you scream ‘Not as long…

Although Napoleon said that every soldier carries a field-marshal’s baton in his knapsack, great leaders are rare. Since Churchill, the…

‘The sound of men arguing over our personal reproductive health choices hurts my ears and it offends my very core,’…

Italy is preparing to go back to the polls and this time Matteo Salvini looks set to return as the…

Last summer, when Italy became the first major European country to get a populist government, Steve Bannon was cock-a-hoop. The…

How we love bringing history into our political debates. It may seem strange in a country where so little history…

The picture on the front of the Animal Blessing Service programme featured a dog, a cat, a rabbit, a goldfish,…

I’ve been coming to the Edinburgh Fringe for five years, but this is the first time I’ve dipped my toe…

Frank Johnson, editor of The Spectator until cruelly sacked to make way for Boris Johnson, never wasted ideas. He liked…

Jazz died in 1959. At least, that’s what New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Payton wrote in 2011 as part of a…

Before Boris Johnson became Prime Minister there was widespread expectation that his government would be chaotic. It was thought that…

Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, proposed an extra 10,000 prison places and the expansion of stop-and-search powers. PC Stuart…

I lay low during the ‘season’ as I can’t think what to say to people any more. I went to…

Girls only Polish village Miejsce Odrzanskie was reported not to have had a single boy born in the past decade,…

The Tories, allegedly a ‘one-nation’ party, are currently imposing Brexit on a divided nation. As a result, some Tory MPs…

Please explain Sir: The crux of manmade CO2 causing climate change rests on being able to explain the thermodynamics of…

Look out. Here comes a column banging on about something that, in the grand scheme of things, really doesn’t matter.…

When last week’s IPCC report warned that the human race may soon have trouble feeding itself, my reaction was: duh.…

It came as no great surprise that the UK economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, following…

I wonder what Jacques Derrida would have made of the new leader of the UK Independence party? In the philosopher’s…

We seem to be building up to a second Tiananmen Square, 30 years after the first. This time the venue…

Every Friday at 6 p.m. government aides are summoned to No. 10 Downing Street for a meeting with Dominic Cummings,…

Two words may pique the reader’s interest on the cover of this timely, panoramic history of Europe by the distinguished…

Nobody warns you when you start medical school that your career decisions have only just begun. Up to a decade…

On paper, Candace Bushnell and the medieval warlord El Cid don’t have a lot in common. The first made a…

Téa Obreht’s second novel is an expansive and ambitious subversion of Western tropes, set in fin de siècle America. We…

The accepted story of mid-20th century culture in Britain belongs to the boys: the British Invasion, Beyond the Fringe and…

Who was Walter Bagehot? For generations of politics students he has been the all-but-unpronounceable — Bayge-hot? Baggott? — author of…

North Korea watchers are good book-buyers, rarely able to resist scratching that itch of interest caused by the world’s worst…

Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s beloved history elder, has written 40 books and his terms like ‘tyranny of distance’ have pervaded our…

Only one thing makes Frank Skinner nervous. ‘Water. Water scares me. I don’t get nervous on stage. Just in swimming…

The old observatory on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill may be the most favourably positioned art venue in the world. Recently resurrected…

It was as though Damien Hirst had confessed a secret passion for Victorian watercolours, or Lars von Trier had admitted…

Clive Anderson’s show about Macbeth, ‘the greatest drama ever written’, offers us an hour of polished comedy loosely themed around…

The Bright Stream is a ballet about a collective farm. Forget everything you know about collectivism — the failed harvests,…

Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (BBC4) began with some footage of kids queuing…

Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, is a sprawling tale set in Hollywood in 1969, against…

We live in a time of paradoxes. The NSW Parliament has just legislated for terminations to be performed from 22…

If it hadn’t arrived I’d be dead, but it was hardly welcome: another birthday — 38 years old on 11…

A 20-minute drive through quiet country lanes then suddenly a madcap roundabout and teeming new ring road and finally the…

One thing Lorraine Kelly does not say in the Wayfair advert is: ‘What if I fancy getting my money back…

Before this year’s Shergar Cup meeting all I had seen of Australian flat jockey Mark Zahra was a memorably painful…

The German expression zugzwang means ‘compulsion to move’ and is most often seen in the endgame. Consider the following position…

White to play. This position is from Alekhine-Nimzowitsch, San Remo 1930. Can you spot the quiet move that puts black…

In Competition No. 3111 you were invited to submit William Topaz McGonagall’s poetic response to Magaluf.   The Tayside Tragedian…

‘40/37/1A’, as he has been called, was born in 28 (two words) and died in 30/36. He was a reluctant…

Unclued lights are all sweet wines. WESTERNISED, an anagram of DESSERT WINE, was to be highlighted. &nbspFirst prize Erin Barrack,…

The Glorious Twelfth this year, signalling the start of the grouse-shooting season, was overshadowed by a Labour party press release…

Recently I suggested a new approach to commuter-train overcrowding. It simply involved reformulating the problem by accepting that not all…

Q. I want my guests to feel welcome when they stay with us and certainly don’t want to nag them.…

Foolish me. I could have been writing this by the shore of Lake Trasimene, with only one problem: how to…

‘What about poetaster, then?’ asked my husband accusingly, looking up from his whisky and the Spectator, in which I’d ruminated…