The Spectator
17 February 2018 Aus
Australia
Exorcising Malcolm
Those close to the Prime Minister talk of ‘good Malcolm’ versus ‘bad Malcolm’ – the two sides to Mr Turnbull’s…
Australian diary
I returned to Parliament a week early for hearings of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. The committee…
Australian Features
Darwin’s puppets
When I was young, like many teenagers, I considered science dull. At a Passover dinner one year, I declared this…
When will they ever learn?
One January morning in 1800, a mysterious being emerged from the woods near Aveyron in France. The size of a…
Is time running out for Western civilisation?
‘What is civilisation? I don’t know. I can’t define it in abstract terms yet, but I think I can recognise…
Eyeballing DFAT
The problem with our foreign affairs bureaucracy isn’t just the consistent political correctness and suspicion of the Coalition. Much time…
Harvey Weinstein Syndrome
As with most popular movements, what starts from good intentions frequently spirals out of control – or beyond what its…
Autocues for the clueless
Was anyone really surprised when the factional warlords and powerbrokers in the key NSW division of the Liberal party so…
Features
Does aid do more harm than good?
What a scandal for our times. Oxfam, that upholder of modern-day virtue, unassailable in its righteousness, buried for seven years…
Why we keep ignoring NGO sex scandals
One of the oddest things about the Oxfam sex scandal is how little we all seem to care. Even now,…
Homer’s Trojan War epic richly deserves its lavish new BBC adaptation
Did the Trojan War really take place? The Foreign Secretary certainly thinks so. ‘The Iliad must have happened,’ Boris Johnson…
In defence of Christopher Steele
There are two Trump-Russia ‘conspiracies’. In one, the US President is bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. In the other,…
My Sri Lankan stroke: how a book festival turned into a horror story
This time last year, it seemed that life couldn’t get much better for me: I had a new book out…
Stop and search is our best weapon in the fight against crime
According to the latest recorded crime figures in England and Wales, there has been a steep rise in violence. Knife…
Why is Virgin East Coast ditching its quiet coach?
Virgin East Coast, reneging on its franchise, is not in anyone’s good books at the moment, but since it is…
Marx in Trier
‘Trier hates you,’ reads the graffiti outside the Karl-Marx-Wohnhaus in Trier. Actually, that’s a bit unfair. Trier doesn’t hate Marx,…
The Week
Portrait of the Week: Oxfam faces losing funding as crisis grows over abuse claims
Home The Charity Commission said it would hold a statutory inquiry into a scandal in which Oxfam staff paid for…
My trip to Pakistan’s ‘Jihadi Disneyland’
Not so long ago, Barack Obama called Waziristan ‘the most dangerous place in the world’. It was the losing front…
Trotsky’s audacity
From ‘News of the week’, 16 February 1918: Last Sunday M. Trotsky announced at Brest-Litovsk that Russia would fight no…
Article 50 and the Athenians
Europe, a majority of MPs (party loyalties aside), the Lords, the civil service, the BBC and the CBI are all…
Are these the coldest Winter Olympics ever?
Museums of curiosity The former culture secretary Ed Vaizey suggested that there are quite enough museums in Britain, and that…
Letters: the militant suffragettes set back their own cause
Suffragette setbacks Sir: Jane Ridley (‘Women on the warpath’, Books, 10 February) claims that Millicent Fawcett and her suffragists had ‘got nowhere’…
Why we shouldn’t try the jihadi ‘Beatles’ in Britain
The success of the military campaign against Isis in Syria and Iraq has left behind a diplomatic and legal problem:…
Columnists
Oxfam is the Harvey Weinstein of aid
The Queen is Head of the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is headquartered in London, in the splendour of Marlborough House. The…
There can be no Brexit deal without Tory unity
In a hung parliament, recess takes on a particular importance for the government. It is a chance for ministers to…
There’s a reason women sell roof tiles in hotpants
I would rather watch flies buzzing around a light bulb for two hours than Formula 1. At least the flies…
I miss Auberon Waugh. He’d know what to say about relentless women’s issues
Every now and then one suddenly misses somebody. I miss Bron, who died 17 years ago last month. There’s an…
Why not ban artists who forget to feed their cats or recycle?
Sometimes a picture — the big picture — is worth more than a thousand words. Consider this Art vs Artist,…
Could the Serious Fraud Office put an end to Barclays as we know it?
The Serious Fraud Office has upped the stakes in the case of the controversial $3 billion Qatari financing that saved…
Books
Hitler’s charm offensive at the Berlin Olympics was a sinister cover for his main offensive
The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
César Aira returns to the evocative small-town landscape of his youth
The publication of César Aira’s The Lime Tree in Chris Andrews’s assured translation is a reminder that much of the…
Why do people risk their lives to fight for a foreign cause?
What’s the point of a cover if not to judge a book by? One look at the image on the…
Kafa, the birthplace of coffee, was a kingdom straight out of Rider Haggard
For many of us, coffee is the lift that eases the load of our working day. Yet the sharpened mental…
It’s not a wave’s crest, but its translucent interior that surfers dream of
Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and…
How Lucky Lucan begged me for money shortly before mistakenly murdering the nanny
A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south…
A century of Ethiopia’s turbulent history, seen through the life of one woman
Yetemegn was barely eight years old when her parents married her off to a man in his thirties. Before she…
Despite her inability to talk or swallow, Genevieve Fox brims with joie de vivre
A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve…
Churchill was all in favour of a united Europe — as long as it didn’t include Britain
Dr Felix Klos is an extremely personable, highly intelligent American-Dutch historian who has undertaken much archival research, worked extremely hard…
Mary Whitehouse’s publishers also produced Gang Girls, The Degenerates and Bikers at War
The year 1971 was a busy one for Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed ‘Clean-up TV’ campaigner. Not only did she help establish…
The more outrageous sf fantasies give way to soft dystopias
Science fiction, as any enthusiast will tell you, is not just about gazing into the future but also about illuminating…
The Charlie Hebdo attacks form a backdrop to a complicated love triangle in C.K. Stead’s latest novel
There has been much debate recently about what exactly constitutes ‘literary’ fiction. If the term means beguiling, gorgeously crafted novels…
The Fighting Kangaroo
Jim Eames, an established and respected aviation writer, whose previous credits include The Flying Kangaroo, a history of Qantas, has…
Arts
The last survivor of The Birthday Party’s 1958 première remembers the traumatic first night
‘Mad, wearying and inconsequential gabble,’ sighed the Financial Times in 1958. ‘One quails in slack-jawed dismay.’ Here’s the FT at…
David Hare is the kind of second-rate artist who flourished under Stalin
Shortly after my rave review of McMafia eight weeks ago, I got a long message from an old friend chastising…
A colossal bore: Royal Opera’s Carmen reviewed
The new production of Bizet’s Carmen at the Royal Opera has received mixed reviews. It shouldn’t have done. They should…
Why do sweet, tender young lefties like MGMT love the decade of Reagan and Bush Snr?
Grade: B Horrific memory, flooding back, halfway through the track ‘TSLAMP’ (Time Spent Looking at My Phone). It was the…
Radio’s role in winning the Cold War
Some of us grew up worrying about reds under the bed, which was perhaps not as foolish as all that…
‘I was really, really scared’: Jonas Kaufmann opens up about his #MeToo moment
‘Hi, it’s Jonas.’ When the great tenor rings from Vienna, I ask if there are any topics he wants me…
I liked Shape of Water well enough but Lady Bird is where it’s at
Lady Bird is a semi-autobiographical film written and directed by Greta Gerwig with a plot synopsis that need not detain…
Why do critics claim to adore the waffle-fest that is Long Day’s Journey into Night?
It’s considered the great masterpiece of 20th-century American drama. Oh, come off it. Long Day’s Journey into Night is a…
Paula and Helen Thomson in Top Girls
Caryl Churchill is getting on a bit; I know because she was born just two days after me. She is…
Life
Taki: My #MeToo moment
#MeToo! It happened right here, in Gstaad, last week. A man in his mid-fifties, about six foot tall and 165lb,…
Even the BBC’s recipes are politically correct
I’m cooking almost full-time for my poor old Mum and learning on the job: shepherd’s pie, roast pork, cauliflower cheese.…
I’ve faked my own iPhone death
After much thought, I am toying with the idea of faking my own death. I mean in a virtual sense,…
What makes a champion jockey
Write a few books and you have to listen politely at parties as people who have never opened yours tell…
Knight outriders
A good rule of thumb is to avoid sending off knights to excursions at the edge of the board, where…
no. 493
White to play. This position is from Capablanca-Fonaroff, New York 1918. Once again there is a knight on h6. What…
That lovin’ feeling
In Competition No. 3035 you were invited to provide a poem entitled ‘The Love Song of [insert name of a…
2346: The name of the game
The unclued entries (two hyphened) are all synonyms. Each of five clues contains a word that must be removed to…
to 2343: Rats!
The perimeter quote is by Nietzsche (taking the 1 in the top left corner as the first word). Other unclued lights…
Peter Rabbit ‘allergy bullying’? I’m allergic to all this constant outrage
I’m often surprised by what people are offended by. Like the makers of Peter Rabbit, the new animated feature from…
Reducing activities to their core misses the point
There may be a very simple evolutionary reason why water does not really taste of anything, as I learned from…
Dear Mary: How can we get our star friend along to dinner when he’s so busy?
Q. We want to invite a rather exceptional friend to dinner. He lives nearby but he has a top job…
I’m grateful for my grateful drinking friend
The phone rang. ‘You are the last person in the world I should be talking to’, proclaimed an old friend…
‘Sorted’ has always had connotations of menace
My heart leapt up on Newport station, an unusual place for that to happen, when I heard a recorded announcement:…
