The Spectator
Australia
Against the grain
‘My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views.’…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great Pandemic?’ People are getting ready to answer this question for when things…
Latham’s law
In the Cancel Culture Revolution now under way, the role of woke corporations continues to defy rational belief. Even the…
Australian notes
Vision of justice ‘Justice is the end [goal] of government. It is the end of civil society,’ argued James Madison,…
Australian Features
Black Lives Matter and the scourge of anti-semitism
Anti-Zionism fuels the so-called ‘anti-racist’ BLM
Features
Mugs
Rishi Sunak found himself in hot water last week, though fortunately it was not too hot. Just the right temperature,…
The Week
The mask slips
When Michael Gove delivered the Ditchley Annual Lecture last month he spoke about why citizens feel that the political system…
Wars and unjust peace
In 1984, China agreed a ‘one country, two systems’ treaty with the UK, designed to control the relationship between Hong…
Portrait of the Week
Home New regulations would compel people to wear a face covering in shops in England from 24 July on pain…
Columnists
The politics of mask-wearing
We are enjoined by certain experts to wear face masks while having sexual intercourse. No change there, then, for me.…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Just rejoice’, as Mrs Thatcher once said about something else. The government’s decision to debug our national security by getting…
Banning Huawei is right, but late – and bad for productivity
This column has been banging on about the peculiar nature of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms giant, ever since its expanded…
The state of the Union
The greatest single danger to this government is the state of the Union. Prime ministers can survive many things, but…
My fears for my church have been realised
The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from…
She was just a damn cat – and I loved her
I’ve never dug a grave before. But that was how I spent my Sunday afternoon. Three feet is awfully deep…
Books
Deeply disturbing
Sorry For Your Trouble (Bloomsbury, £16.99), Richard Ford’s 13th book of fiction, shows a writer still very much on song.…
Sweetness and light
Who would imagine that Johann Zoffany’s celebrated 1780 depiction of the extensive Sharp family happily making music on their pleasure…
All change
A journalist and poet based in Zagreb, Robert Perišic was in his early twenties when the socialist federal republic of…
Fowl indignity
It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot or Herbert Hoover’s less sexy-sounding chicken in every pot, but even in…
Dark secrets
Passé Blanc is the Creole expression — widely used in the US — for black people ‘passing for white’ to…
Only human after all
Ludwig von Beethoven belongs among those men whom not only Vienna and Germany, but Europe and our entire age revere.…
In bad odour
Michael Bywater wonders why the existence of smell still seems such a guilty secret
How to while away the winter
Competition is stiff among museums in Iceland. The Phallological Museum in Húsavík, devoted to the penis, stands tall in a…
What’s the world coming to?
It wasn’t until half way through Jenny Kleeman’s Sex Robots and Vegan Meat that I was able to put my…
Base politics
Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York moved to the lectern. It was the Cow Palace in San Francisco in…
Arts
Mystery portrait
Shortly after moving to Manhattan in the noughties I was strolling through the West Village when I came across a…
David Hockney A closer winter tunnel, February-March 2006
The National Gallery of Victoria has closed again ‘until further notice’. The rest of the country is more fortunate, at…
Net effect
Let’s face it. Theatre via the internet is barely theatre. It takes a huge amount of creativity and inventiveness to…
Corona-gardening
The American diet was probably at its healthiest in the second world war. Fearing interruption to supply chains, Washington launched…
Licensed to kill
Clemency stars Alfre Woodard as a prison warden on death row whose job is beginning to take its toll, and…
Selves examined
Gwyneth Paltrow has a new neighbour. On the same block in Notting Hill as Gwynie’s Goop store, with its This…
The keys to Beethoven
If you want to understand Beethoven, listen to his piano sonatas. Without them, you’ll never grasp how the same man…
Containing multitudes
It might seem a bit of a stretch to see deep similarities between Michaela Coel (young, female, black and currently…
Life
How did I end up in Epstein’s black book?
Every time Jeffrey Epstein is in the news, I start getting calls from strangers wanting to scream abuse at me.…
The ugly side of the beautiful game
So all that sound and fury about Manchester City’s sins signified precisely nothing. Well, a €10 million fine isn’t nothing,…
Deadweight
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with…
Comfort eating
Brasserie Zédel is a grand salon under Piccadilly Circus and the only place I desired when lockdown (or lock-in) ceased…
Glasto and Glynders
In Competition No. 3157 you were invited to describe a visit to Glastonbury or Glyndebourne in the style of an…
Solution to 2463: Tongue Twisters
The unclued lights were all languages which are written from right to left, entered in that manner in the grid.…
2466: Gender bender
Clockwise round the grid from 11 run, in chronological order, the titles (7,7,7,9,2,8,2,10) of five works by an author whose…
An ugly duckling problem
The position shown in this week’s main diagram is the starter problem for the Winton British Chess Solving Championship, an…
Puzzle no. 613
White to play and mate in three moves. A problem composed by grandmaster Jonathan Levitt (British Chess Magazine, 1995). One…
Aussie Life
Jordan Shanks is not your average lefty. This unusual Australian YouTuber, who goes by the name of FriendlyJordies, disdains such…










































































