‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay…’ Easier said than done, of course, at the end of a…

Some people think the electoral contest between Chis Minns and Dom Perrottet is the equivalent of a long-running version of…

This has been the year when the Liberal party teetered to the edge of oblivion. Unless something dramatic happens, next…

Shock! I’ve found a bomb in my library. My sanctuary. My hermitage. I’d hauled down a book of essays one…

Kiwis have been pushing us around for millions of years

Serfdom, here we come

Digital vaccine passports just the ticket to Brave New World

... as the rest of the world looks on, bemused

A year of foolish deals, betrayal and appeasement

May as well

And who on Earth listens to Flint?

Quirky things to be grateful for

The push for peace

After a tumultuous year, Rishi Sunak is taking stock

Russia’s exiled media should be protected, not shut down

Handel’s Messiah is as much a Christmas tradition as pantomime

Tom Holland and Robert Harris on interpreting history, eco-radicals and why monarchy is essential

Nothing compares with Antarctica

Quentin Blake’s long history with The Spectator

The comical incompetents who give hope to us all

  Lazarivka   Snow has covered the fields and forests of much of Ukraine. When the sun reigns in the…

The James Webb Space telescope is changing our understanding of the universe

Illustrated by James Weston Lewis

The mystery of Jesus’s siblings

    The post Christmas past and present: an illustrator’s view appeared first on The Spectator.

A Christmas poll

Nick Cave on grief, faith and why he’s a conservative

A history of mistletoe

A conversation between Rory Sutherland and Slavoj Žižek

Christmas won’t be the same without Raymond Briggs

January The first day of the year reached 16.3°C in St James’s Park, London. In France, 874 cars were set…

This year, for the first time, millions of Ukrainians will celebrate Christmas on 25 December. The Orthodox Church had used…

Two very brief excerpts from Radio 4 last week. First, my wife turned on her radio in time to hear…

The year of the three emperors in Prussia changed world history. In 1888, Wilhelm I died and was succeeded by…

Towards the end of his life the art critic Hilton Kramer was overheard leaving a cinema with his wife. One…

’Tis indeed the season to be jolly.  Over the holidays, we can all put our feet up to view a…

It’s hard to explain how sad it will be if, after Christmas, Defra officials ban fishing on Holy Island, also…

I admire stout oldies who, even in good times, refuse to put the heating on unless it’s absolutely necessary. They…

From time to time newspapers invite writers to describe the ‘books that changed my life’. The resulting columns too often…

2022: good reads for a mixed bag of a year

For answers, click here The post Spot the book title appeared first on The Spectator.

The empress Eugénie – the Spanish-born last empress-consort of France, wife of Napoleon III, mother of the prince imperial –…

Jonathan Sumption describes the age-old obsession of bibliophiles with acquiring rare illuminated manuscripts

There are a few pop stars whose work I can’t help liking in spite of myself – their song-writing, that…

Apart from when the government has been self-immolating, the royal family has dominated the news recently: the passing of Queen…

In June 2017 Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was surprised when Jane Sarkin, his features editor, told him…

The American poet Robert Lowell (1917-77) was a so-called ‘Boston Brahmin’, a Lowell of Boston, where, in the widely known…

Despite its many centuries of popularity – enthusiasts have ranged from Cleopatra to Eric Clapton – angling has been the…

Brawling, boozing and womanising, those vaunted hell-raisers of the 1960s – Peter O’Toole, Oliver Reed, Richard Burton and, of course,…

In Keep Talking, David Dimbleby takes us through a gentle romp of a stellar, unrivalled broadcasting career spanning, incredibly, 70…

What a box of contradictions Christmas is. There’s the quest for presents – which can get urgent and exhilarated in…

What’s wrong with sentimentality? The answer, I’d suggest, could either be: a) its almost bullying insistence on us having emotions…

Corsage is a biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria who was prized for her beauty and fashion sense and may…

A dank Tuesday evening in a West End theatre. The auditorium is barely two thirds full. The play is nothing…

Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…

A Christmas revival of New Adventures’ ten-year-old production of Sleeping Beauty stirs up all my nagging ambivalence about Matthew Bourne’s…

The Wagatha Christie affair began in 2019 when Coleen Rooney accused Rebekah Vardy of selling stories from her private Instagram…

It’s unlikely that Irving Berlin was pondering the energy price cap when he composed the seasonal standard ‘I’ve Got My…

Temperature records for Los Angeles in the summer of 1945 are patchy, but 90 in the shade seems to have…

There is nothing more panto than a dame. The grandmother of today’s dames is Dan Leno (1860–1904), a champion clog…

Laura Gascoigne on the shadowy Flemish artist Hugo van der Goes, whose painting in the Uffizi upstages the masterpieces of Botticelli

It might not be a very net-zero-friendly activity, but driving around to view the Christmas light show is part of…

It’s Word of the Year time again, when all the dictionaries announce their chosen winner. The Australian National Dictionary Centre…

This time last year, I was disgustingly well organised. Awaiting the arrival of my first baby, with a late December…

Two unclued lights are a title (three words) and its creator (two words). Remaining unclued lights are four names and…

1. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin 2. Scoop 3. The Thirty-Nine Steps 4. Moll Flanders 5. The Girl on the Train 6.…

Verbals 1. Boris Johnson, on resigning as leader of the Conservative party 2. Liz Truss, on being elected leader of…

Verbals In 2022, who said: 1. Them’s the breaks. 2. I know that we will deliver, we will deliver, we…

Kenya Tonj is a war-battered settlement on a river that eventually feeds into the White Nile, in South Sudan. When…

Then dear old Dolly drove down from Essex to pay her respects. It was a brave effort because she hasn’t…

Not everything in the entire world is going to hell in a half-track. A few days ago, I tasted some…

It is often said that Rishi Sunak has no idea what it is like to survive on a low income…

Bacchanalia is the new restaurant from Richard Caring – I sense he would like me to call it a ‘landmark’…

Few sights in the history of cricket have been more thrilling – or more terrifying for batsmen – than the…

When I imagine the perfect Christmas lunch, I think of the end of A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge turns…