The border protection debate is roaring again, and we’re happy to join the fun. One place to start is to…

It is good to read something worthwhile in the press and I had the opportunity to do exactly that the…

To start with a story: long years ago in 1978 Mary Lady Fairfax hosted a dinner in her Point Piper…

Tony Abbott became the seventh Australian Prime Minister to select a PM’s XI to play against a major touring team,…

When taking a gap year, it is meant to be just that. A year. Alas, I’m into my second year…

Memo to the National Union of Students: ditch the ideology and represent undergraduates

The only way to stop aggressive drunks is for the state to become even more aggressive with them

The left should be angry at how we treat those at the bottom. Instead, they're angry at people talking about it

Why Iain Duncan Smith winces whenever a Tory denounces benefit claimants

His affair shows that the French are becoming more puritanical

Did Harold Macmillan stitch up his succession – or did Iain Macleod’s famous Spectator piece, 50 years old this week, stitch up Macmillan?

New light is shed on the president's politics, smoothed over in 'Long Walk to Freedom'

The Simpsons star explains what it takes to bring America’s most reviled president back to sympathetic life

Snooping shouldn't be a conservative principle. In the US and elsewhere, the right understand that

‘What are people in your country saying about Holland these days?’ one Dutch friend recently asked me. I hadn’t the…

Greedy, foolish governments got us into the crisis – and they're making the same mistakes now we're getting out

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that English local authorities would be allowed to receive all the business rates…

The architects have taken Shoreditch, but at least they left us the pubs

The MP wants 'a thousand little city states'. But he clearly doesn't know what that would mean...

Plus: Politicians priced by portrait, and the stats battle over plastic bags

Papal blessing Sir: In his excellent article on Pope Francis (‘Pope idol’, 11 January), Luke Coppen mentions the satirical rumour…

Defeat by Ukip in the Euro elections could drive the Tories into a panic from which they wouldn't recover

Plus: Requiem for a spymaster, and a defence of Radio 3's diversity

I wonder what Dawkins and de Botton make of that?

Internet users might find something familiar in Dorothy Whipple’s Someone at a Distance

Whenever trouble broke out, Father Paolo Dell’Oglio has been drawn towards it

It’s normal, healthy and civilised to make kids kiss granny. Why do we listen to these loons?

Plus: Tony Hayward’s comeback, the businessman we should send to Brussels, and the case for raising the minimum wage

Claudia Renton's Those Wild Wyndhams captures the riches and rage of the famous high-society sisters — Mary, Madeline and my great-grandmother Pamela

Another John Williams novel has been republished, this one set in the bleak and rugged American West

David Pilling's Bending Adversity looks at Japan's lost decade and ageing population — the country's resilience may hold a key for the West

Helen Trinca's Madeleine is a biography on the tortured but talented Australia-born writer Madeleine St John, who deserves to be far better known  

In How to Be a Heroine, Samantha Ellis looks at the literary heroines who shaped her life — and finally finds one she can use as her role model

One Hundred Letters, a selection of the historian's correspondence, shows he was not only clever and witty, but kindly, wise — and a liberal who disliked conformity

John Biffen's memoir Semi-Detached reveals the Tory politician's struggle with mental illness — and a paranoid, vindictive and megalomaniac Maggie

Above the range in the kitchen at Charleston House is a painted inscription: ‘Grace Higgens worked here for 50 years…

Scott Fitzgerald once made the famous observation that there are no second acts in American life. Perhaps. But Mike Carlton…

In a small log cabin, just next to the plush ski resorts, the German exile Kirchner produced extraordinarily powerful works of art

My dependency means my CD collection has doubled, while my number of friends has halved — luckily, there's a fix for this

Plus: My dear friend T.G. Rosenthal helped in Lowry's breakthrough — and he will be remembered fondly

Plus: Newcomer Gareth Cadwallader's Cleopatra shows he deserves another shot — and a determined editor

Mike Poulton's stage adaptations of Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are a triumph — but he needs to build sympathy for the bodies in Bodies

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street will set the cat among the pigeons as a number of films do.…

Soon, we will demand that every programme give us a twist every two ticks — just try to sit through the plodding Hostages

The media witch-hunt of Christopher Jeffries reminds us that in the rush to be first with information, compromises are being made

Unless you made your own outfits, were into the deviant or 'Glam Fetish', you might not have stood a chance

Word had got round that Screw would provide oral sex to anyone who scored a home run...

Oscar would have been just the sort of bloke a 19th-century mill owner looked for

They seem to be working together — although I think it's the iPhone that is the truly malevolent force

The French like dash and elegance in their leaders — they don't mind the mistress as much as the moped

My challenge has always been to recapture the adrenalin of riding on an Ethiopian tank — so I'm off to Mogadishu to set up fast-food outlets

Do you ever watch the greats playing bridge? And if you do, are you sometimes baffled, because instead of playing…

Towards the end of last year, those two old warhorses Anatoly Karpov and Jan Timman added to their total of over…

White to play. This position is a variation from Nepomniachtchi-Ivanchuk, Beijing 2013. White has a ferocious attack. How can he…

In Competition 2830 you were invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position…

Unclued lights form four thematic pairs, one of which combines to form a single word.   Across   1    Working…

Christmas carols, and their anagrammed ‘new titles’:   O COME ALL YE FAITHFUL IT CAME UPON THE MIDNIGHT CLEAR ONCE…

Ian Livingstone's 'revolutionary' talk about education is old rot

Like the spork and the sofa bed, the smartphone is still a bad compromise

Plus: A cure for London ‘location blindness’

As a life, it was a scintillating spectrum of the human condition. There was hardship and suffering, as well as…

Mark Duggan’s supporters are using a slogan with a surprisingly long history among the chanting classes