As 2021 drew to an end, the quest for the Speccie Christmas Special front cover began. How  best to sum…

A great reset of one’s own When the last long New South Wales lockdown was imposed, I was probably exhausted.…

Christmas staff parties. Who goes with Christmassy joy, not apprehension or a need to ‘show your face’? I’m just back…

Western classical music is now in the cross-hairs

Your guide to finding Christmas cheer

Democracy dies as the factional warlords thrive

Come Christmas, it’s not only Santa lurking in the chimney

Dividing Australians by race

Confused by the double standards of the Left? So you should be

Yet another emperor seeks to obliterate Christianity

How to survive in the wake of woke

Ghosts and Christmases past

Who would be picked for its 1st XV?

Joan Collins and Taki on golden Hollywood, fist-fights and getting cancelled

A short story by Lissa Evans

J.K. Rowling Poignant, funny and genuinely scary, The Hundred and One Dalmatians was one of my favourite books as a…

Reactions to the recent passing of F.W. de Klerk transported me back to my childhood in South Africa. The horror…

The closest thing we have to a native Christmas tree is the often broccoli-shaped Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris). But the…

A chilling Victorian tradition

I’ve lived in Chelsea for the past 35 years. Since 2002, I’ve photographed everything I find interesting here — churches,…

What happens to Afghan migrants when they reach the UK?

How science fiction can prepare us for what happens next

The tiny charity that saves derelict churches from destruction

The philosopher David Chalmers on whether the universe is a simulation

Steven Pinker and Rory Sutherland on reason vs instinct

After being landlocked for the past 18 months, it was a particular thrill to set off to film in three…

My mother died earlier this year aged 85. She left me her old pianola. These were popular in the 1920s…

In Hatchards for the launch of Andrea Rose’s catalogue raisonné of Leon Kossoff’s oil paintings. It’s bad for the morale…

A few weeks ago, a newspaper carried a rather mundane story about some personnel changes at my charity, Sarah’s Trust,…

Can Boris take back control of No. 10?

Michael Gove on levelling up, Plan B and the price of politics

If the revolution won’t be televised, the counter-revolution will at least be on PowerPoint. A series of 36 corporate-style PowerPoint…

The last Noël in the USSR

Centenaries 2022 will see the 100th anniversary of: the BBC; Reader’s Digest; Ulysses by James Joyce; insulin treatment for diabetes;…

Wrong cure Sir: In referring to the UK as the highest-spending European nation in healthcare proportionate to GDP (‘Hospital pass’,…

Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long…

I have not given up on my Build Back Boris campaign, which is the most pressing concern facing the UK.…

It is two years since Boris Johnson achieved one of the most remarkable election victories in modern history. The large…

January The United Kingdom found itself in possession of a trade agreement with the EU. Coronavirus restrictions were tightened. The…

I was recently reading the works of the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey, who at one point mentions a ghost craze…

A friend, a Cambridge professor, passing my old college last week, was startled to encounter a young lady standing outside…

How well-behaved have you been in the second year of Covid? I wouldn’t say I’ve been perfect but I haven’t…

Despite the political misery for Boris Johnson as he ends the year, he has a big hope: that salaries will…

Since I first read about the torture and murder of six-year-old Arthur Labinjo-Hughes, I’ve had what feels like an A-level…

A few years back, a hackneyed journalistic come-hither led me to a sober reckoning: would I write about someone alive…

Twice recently I’ve been asked my opinion of ‘Doughnut Economics’. The first time, I was tempted to cover my ignorance…

The interregnum between incumbents is a well-known and often elongated process in the Church of England. I have recently witnessed…

My abiding memory of this fairly appalling year is of the face of the young student at Durham University who…

2021: grit your teeth and read a good book

Lolita, the Lady Chatterley trial, the pill, Christine Keeler, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, love-ins, Oh! Calcutta!, the Oz trial…

Last year I wrote a piece about James Bond for the ‘Freelance’ column of the Times Literary Supplement. All true…

Truffles smell of sex. Even if we can’t quite say what we mean by ‘smell’ or ‘sex’ in this sentence,…

A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got…

Jan Morris, in all her incarnations, was always able to evoke a place and a moment like no other. As…

For answers, click here

On 2 October last year, when he became chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service (MI6, if you prefer), Richard…

‘Who,’ asks Stephen Bayley, in one of the ‘S.B’ chapters of this irresistibly spiky co-written book, ‘could countenance working for…

Rising professors do well to be controversial if they wish to be invited to contribute to mainstream media. But the…

In his new book on Europe’s cathedrals, Simon Jenkins begins with the claim that the greatest among them are our…

The Rosetta Stone has an awful lot in common with a Kinder Surprise Egg. Hear me out. The actual text…

Robert Alter is both exasperated and beguiled by Roberto Calasso’s intellectual potpourri

It was the thought of Stephen Sondheim’s death that made us watch Imelda Staunton in Gypsy. It’s the second musical…

Moomins do not like winter. In one of Tove Jansson’s stories, Moomin’s Winter Follies, young Moomintroll bumps his head when…

For people who like a good upper-class scandal (or ‘people’, as they’re also known), 1963 was definitely a vintage year.…

Martin Gayford on a radical Nativity that is the subject of one of the great whodunnits of art history

It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It…

Jack and the Beanstalk is a big, sprawling family show that opens with a baffling gesture. A booming voiceover announces…

The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. The ballet wasn’t always considered quite such a box of delights

The enduring appeal of The Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky’s ravishing score is nothing less than the sound of Christmas

The Lost Daughter is an adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel about motherhood that says, quite ferociously: it’s complicated. And:…

Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the…

 Grade: C= My wife’s ill with Covid and demanding inexhaustible libations and difficult meals, which she will leave uneaten. The…

Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s…

One of the reasons I still buy newspapers is that what no longer seems to be true of vocabulary and…

This appears to be a case of ‘What were they thinking?’ The good folk at the Macquarie Dictionary have announced…

Someone else with my name is wreaking havoc with my attempts to control the Twitter account I don’t want. Obviously,…

Bridge is not too enticing if your parents had card evenings when you were a child, which often ended in…

From Lady Antonia Fraser Q. I enjoy getting readers’ letters, but there is one category I am at a loss…

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair.’ One can admire the view from Westminster Bridge and feel near the…

At the desk I gave my name and showed my Covid vaccination pass and the woman told me to take…

Christmas brings out the best and the worst in me. It’s a chance to give in to my inclination to…

A joyful Saturday at Ascot recently reminded me that when the old Hurst Park Racecourse (near Hampton Court Palace) closed…

A few weeks after Friedrich Nietzsche bragged to an admirer that he had completed a ruthless attack on our Lord,…

The Connaught Hotel’s formal dining room was always, to me, a place of childish myth; more comforting for being mythical.…

Someone sent me a job advert recently for a Junior Research Fellowship at Queen’s College, Oxford. It states: ‘The Queen’s…

Cis

The unclued lights are cricket fielding positions. The clues contain the names of 12 present and former England cricketers: Old,…

In Competition No. 3229, you were invited to provide the story of the Nativity retold in the style of a…

White to play and mate in 3. Composed by Albert Barbe, 1861. Only the first move is required, but it’s…

I learned a great deal at university, about half of it from a man called Raymond Foulk. Ray was not…

Laikipia Plateau, Kenya Our local chief Panta wore a government-issue khaki uniform with epaulettes, beret and swagger stick. On a…

Sport and politics have always been intertwined, but this was the year they became joined at the hip. Yorkshire racism;…

Ten pairs of unclued lights give the names of people whose 89 was ‘50D/2A’ (six words in total). They include…

1. ‘I like the game, the money, and the fame.’ Which Twitter-loving top grandmaster said that, in response to an…

Set by Christopher Howse. Illustrated by Castro