Malcolm Turnbull, George Brandis and the Coalition are to be applauded for sticking to their guns on the Same Sex…

One day when I was a member of the federal parliament, a surprising thing happened to me. Until then, if…

Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Agri, Big Pharma… every industry these days seems to have its bogeyman collective, the theory…

Beware socialists in white coats Sir Michael Marmot, whom the ABC chose to deliver the 2016 Boyer lectures, is the…

Creativity versus identity News flash: At least two young, female, ‘non-white’ aspiring writers did not like Lionel Shriver’s opening address…

Raise a glass to Tony On September 10th, 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced his decision to end RAAF airstrikes…

Sam Dastyari’s ‘Chinese indiscretion’ hit the press on Tuesday of the first week of parliament. It was immediately followed by…

Malcolm Turnbull’s shilly-shallying before deciding to go ahead with the gay ‘marriage’ plebiscite is what we have come to expect…

We are a nation of gamblers. We wager more per capita than any other country on earth. But it is…

Treachery at the heart of our politics Australians have been told over and over that Senator Dastyari has broken no…

The fit, or fugue, that Hillary Clinton suffered during a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan on Sunday left mysteries in…

It is almost mandatory, if you want to discuss grammar schools, to swap personal histories. Here’s mine: I am the…

The new consumer obsession of my generation isn’t white goods, trainers or designer labels. It is — whisper it —…

It’s been going on for months now and I must make a confession. I secretly endure a nightly battering in…

Earlier this year my partner paid several hundred thousand pounds for an Aga. There’s no other way of putting it.…

I found my first of London’s many lost rivers when I walked across Holborn Viaduct, looked down at the sweep…

French intelligence Some interesting facts about the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, for the benefit of shadow foreign secretary Emily…

From ‘Mr. Asquith’, The Spectator, 16 September, 1916: King George has no other subject who is trusted so widely by his…

Theresa May wants to use grammar schools to create a meritocratic, ‘socially mobile’ society at a cost of £50 million.…

What immigration debate? Sir: Henrik Jonsson says (Letters, 10 September) that Swedes ought to learn from the Brits how to maintain…

Home Schools in England would have the right to select pupils by ability, under plans outlined by Theresa May, the…

It is too early to tell what sort of Prime Minister Theresa May will turn out to be, but we…

The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…

In the days following David Cameron’s resignation as prime minister, Michael Gove tried to persuade the Cameroons to back Boris…

I went to prison last week, in Birmingham. Early start, off on a train from Euston. It was my kids’…

‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed though right were…

The TUC general secretaryFrances O’Grady doesn’t get a lot of airtime. Compared with predecessors a generation ago, such as Vic…

A lecturer at a reasonably well-respected northern plate-glass university was somewhat perplexed by a student who complained about her poor…

Did you know that Queen Victoria might never have married Prince Albert had it not been for an amazing stroke…

Most nights Saudi bombers fly low over the Yemeni capital of Sanaa dealing out random destruction. High up in the…

The illustrated manuscripts of the European Middle Ages are among the most beautiful works to survive from a maligned and…

Claude Monet wanted to be buried in a buoy. ‘This idea seemed to please him,’ his friend Gustave Geffroy wrote.…

Talk about plutocracy and oligarchy has become commonplace in America, as the billionaire class grows ever richer and seemingly more…

When Rome fell to the Allies on 5 June 1944 General Harold Alexander, commander of the 15th Army, calculated that…

Tama Janowitz’s memoir is a relentlessly cheerless and bitter collection of vignettes. Between tales of her purportedly miserly, creepy and…

You might have thought that the last thing shy people need is a book about shyness: a large part of…

Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without…

All alone on page 313 of this spectacular book, a tattered but heroic flag flies in a painting of an…

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a…

The enormous desk on which I am writing this is swamped by four precarious piles of books, one topped by…

Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless…

It is one of the great set-pieces of high drama in English history. The king, shamed by his part in…

A few years ago, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune stumbled upon what was widely reported as ‘the Holy Grail…

You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted…

Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected…

A big misunderstanding about art is that it excites serene meditation and transcendent bliss. But anyone who has worked in…

Cooking really shouldn’t make good radio. On television, it’s already frustrating that you can’t taste what you’re seeing, but on…

‘My painting is an act of decolonisation,’ declared Wifredo Lam. These are the first words you read on entering the…

The Royal Opera has opened the season with a triumph, and in one of the most difficult of operas, Bellini’s…

For a regular dancegoer in New York City, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater seasons arrive with the comforting predictability…

Coleridge deemed the narrative structure of The Alchemist perfect. But, I wonder. A landowner quits plague-ridden London and his cunning…

Bridget Jones’s Baby is the third outing for our heroine as played by Renée Zellweger, whose cosmetic work to face…

Announcements of 2017 seasons are coming thick and fast. The Sydney Theatre Company, having lost an artistic director on the…

CBeebies Land is a small dystopia inside Alton Towers, a theme park where people sometimes get their legs chopped off…

In Competition No. 2965, an enormously popular one, you were invited to write a poem about a verse form, written…

‘This is the last straw. Never again,’ I thought, as I sat in the carpark of a Little Waitrose eating…

Q. At a recent party I was delighted to find my hosts had put me next to one of their…

I’m jittery and fragile but free of plaster and in the dojo, slowly turning lean and muscular. Never listen to…

As I write, the final results of the Baku Olympiad are still not in. England are fighting for a possible…

Corrections of misprints in clues give CHAMBERS DICTIONARY, defining the items in the perimeter. First prize David Heath, Euston, Newark…

It’s been a very patriotic weekend, ablaze with Union flags. In London there was the Last Night of the Proms…

The 15th World Bridge Games (formerly known as the Olympiad) began on 3 September in Wroclaw, and is providing more…

White to play. This position is a variation from Li Chao-Short, Baku Olympiad 2016. White has various ways to win…

Across clues contain a definition and a jumble of the answer. In each row of the grid, a Shakespearean character…

The post The Battle for Britain appeared first on The Spectator.

It is highly unlikely the Prime Minister has read the book,’ my father harrumphed, commenting on the appropriation of the…

British Lions fans of anervous disposition should avoid the telly of a Saturday morning. Live before your very eyes, as…

Last week in Ladakh I went panting from one Buddhist monastery to another. Culturally, racially and historically, Ladakh is Tibetan,…

Say what you like about the St Leger — and I like it a lot — Doncaster’s finale to the…

What do you say to someone who is killing you? It is seldom possible to decide in advance. We are…