The Spectator
18 May 2019 Aus
Disgustation
Australia
Smarter than a sea sponge
What a relief. It turns out Democratic representative for New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was just joking when she said in…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
In a normal year, Easter is the only time when eggs play anything other than a nutritional part in Australian…
Brown study
You liked Pink Batts? You’ll love Funny Money! Why? Well, I am now convinced that the Liberal party has gone…
Australian Features
Dirty dancing with Fannie and Freddie
You don’t need a crystal ball to see that whoever wins our federal election, the taxpayer is going to be…
All the news that’s fit to spin
Idly watching the ABC’s idea of news one evening and hearing for the thousandth time how man’s greed and indifference…
The fight of my life
Mr President, Not far from where you sit, some 10 metres from the entrance to this old chamber, there’s a…
On aspirational edubabble
The Melbourne Declaration published in 2008 is the road map that education ministers and state, territory and commonwealth bureaucracies have…
Hidden eco-cost of batteries not included
The climate is changing – by how much and by what cause is still up in the air. But, that’s…
Disgustation
‘Would you like the cat consommé?’ The waiter passes me a spoon. I swallow the broth in one go, deciding…
Cross about cross-dressing?
Where is the parental rage to protect our children from an ideologically creepy Labor-Green government? Mums and dads across the…
Features
Cometh the hour: Boris Johnson may be the Tories’ best hope
The worse things are for the Tories, the better for Boris Johnson. If the Tories were ahead in the polls,…
Meet the real Alexander Nix. An interview with the notorious former head of Cambridge Analytica
If you have heard of Alexander Nix, you probably think he’s a villain. He is the former head of Cambridge…
Writers blocked: Even fantasy fiction is now offensive
It was Lionel Shriver who saw the writing on the wall. Giving a keynote speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival…
Snog a Tory: Why you should learn to step outside your comfort zone
Ew! Are you squeamish? Are you grossed out by meat, by fish, by eggs, by scales and suckers and shells…
What one activist’s death tells us about war crimes in Syria
In the 1990s film The Usual Suspects, the detective character explains how to spot a murderer. You arrest three men…
The truth about air quality? It’s the best (and cleanest) in living memory
We are, of course, in the midst of an air pollution crisis which, like every other threat to our health…
How do Britain’s pubs get their names?
An easy one: what links Jack Straw’s Castle, The Labouring Boys and The Jolly Taxpayer? No, not the parliamentary expenses…
The Week
The truth about British inequality? It has very little to do with income
This week the Institute for Fiscal Studies announced a five-year study into inequality in Britain, to be led by the…
Portrait of the week: Brexit party surges in polls, WhatsApp is hacked and Doris Day dies
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said that the EU withdrawal bill would be introduced in the Commons in the…
As a gay Jewish man I did not expect to be spat at in a west London street
There are many places where a gay Jewish couple wearing yarmulkes wouldn’t feel comfortable walking down the street. I didn’t…
Will more babies be called Archie now the royals have chosen it?
Royal name games Will more children be called Archie following the birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son?…
How the ancients kept their minds young
In her cover story last week, Camilla Cavendish argued that we could keep mentally fit in old age through ‘physical…
Letters: Why we deserve Corbyn
Labour’s fence-sitting Sir: James Forsyth writes that Mrs May and Mr Corbyn are ‘not, in fact, that far apart’ (‘May’s…
Columnists
Trump’s Iran strategy: Keep your enemies close and your hawks closer
Washington, DC Donald Trump has an itchy trigger finger, and his name is John Bolton. The President’s national security adviser…
I’m starting to have doubts about Nigel Farage
The echo chamber is the defining characteristic of this berserk and entertaining political age: squadrons of foam-flecked absolutists ranting to…
Gratitude lessons show Eton is losing its way
‘Repeat after me, gentlemen: “Thank you for not letting me into your Oxbridge college because I belong to the wrong…
Metro Bank was the wrong model for its place and time
This column has long been a fan of the concept of ‘challenger banks’ offering alternatives for personal and small business…
Books
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
Parallel worlds: The Heavens, by Sandra Newman, reviewed
The Heavens is Sandra Newman’s eighth book. It follows novels featuring, variously, sex addiction, Buddhism and a post-apocalyptic teen dystopia;…
Gothic extremes of human cruelty: Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, reviewed
It has been 13 years since Thomas Harris published a novel, and the last time he published one without Hannibal…
Feminism for the Fleabag generation: The Polyglot Lovers, by Lina Wolff, reviewed
Everyone behaves badly in The Polyglot Lovers — no saving graces. It’s a complex, shifting structure of sex, self-hatred and…
Drawing from the deck: superb sketches by sailors
Working in the Public Record Office some years ago, I ordered up the logbook of the badly damaged HMS Scylla…
It’s judo, not chess, that’s Putin’s game
These two refreshingly concise books address the same question from different angles: how should we deal with Russia? Mark Galeotti…
The stormy lives of Jack the Dripper and the Wife with the Knife
A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable…
Murder at Margate — and other crimes of passion
Mr Todd is a lonely man, out of work, nursing a thousand grudges while he ekes out a living with…
Levitating basketball players: investigating the psychic in sport
Years ago, a friend persuaded me that a reviewer should almost never give a book a bad review. Most books,…
Where were you when you read John Hersey’s ‘Hiroshima’?
Of how many magazine articles can you recall where you were and what you felt when you read them? If…
Unforgotten person
A newly-elected Australian Prime Minister was pleased to receive a letter of congratulations from Australia’s longest serving PM, Sir Robert…
Arts
From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald
East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark…
The duo that broke the mould of poster design
The best double acts — Laurel and Hardy, Gilbert & George, Rodgers and Hart — are often made up of…
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s #MeToo Medusa is a bad hair day from Hades
Medusa is the bad hair day from Hades. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s retelling of the Greek myth is frizzy, tangled and…
The mosque where it’s the men who make the tea
On returning from a brief trip to Istanbul, where inside the mosques women are still very much kept to one…
Willy Loman would have been fine if he’d worked in a laundry: Death of a Salesman reviewed
Colour-blind casting is a denial of history. The Young Vic’s all-black version of Death of a Salesman asks us to…
Anderszewski went at Beethoven’s Diabellis with a nail gun
Are Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations really ‘the greatest of all piano works’, as Alfred Brendel claims? It’s hardly what you would…
A clunky exercise in box-ticking: Russell T. Davies’s Years and Years reviewed
These days, a common way of introducing radio news items is with the words ‘How worried should we be about…?’…
A Saturday-night variety show: Take That at the O2 reviewed
Being old is big business in live music nowadays, in a way it wasn’t even 25 years ago. When Take…
Startlingly fresh and jaggedly strange: Birds of Passage reviewed
You don’t come across too many films from Colombia, but every few years one wriggles its way through the festival…
John Beard Edmund (+Bill)
I don’t imagine the newest member of the Royal Family was named after the Archibald Prize but it was a…
Life
The death of New York’s nightlife
New York This is my last week in the Bagel and I’m going to give it the old college…
Now that Brexit’s been cancelled I’m moving to the Dordogne
‘When you are in a hole stop digging. Have you never heard that?’ I asked the builder boyfriend, as he…
Ivory gates
This year’s Grand Chess Tour kicked off in the Ivory Coast with a significant innovation, the first ever tournament in…
no. 554
Black to play. This is from Topalov-Carlsen, Côte d’Ivoire 2019. How did the world champion finish off? Answers to me…
Verse and reverse
In Competition No. 3098 you were invited to submit a poem that can be read forwards and backwards, i.e. from…
2408: End of the line
Unclued lights name a man born on 18 May; his position; his son; and (singly or correctly paired, two of…
to 2405: Satanic
DEVILS at 33D (its ‘essence’ is ‘EVIL’) is linked with ‘Malevolence’ (13) and ‘Roguish’ (19) and Devil’s CANDLESTICK (1), ON…
In defence of British landowners (and the truth about grouse moors)
I was surprised to read the article by Ben Macdonald in last week’s Spectator urging Britain’s grouse moor owners to…
The fans make British football what it is – stop fleecing them
It is always possible to tell the difference between a bunch of Manchester City fans and auditions for the latest…
Dear Mary: I’m disabled – how can I stop my carer being so controlling?
Q. I am a disabled man with a good brain and an independent bent. However, I need help to wash…
Tantrums and a top-notch tabbouleh: Ergon House in Athens reviewed
Ergon House is an epicurean boutique hotel in downtown Athens. (I quote the blurb — I never write ‘boutique’ willingly.)…
‘Bolection’ and how the language of architecture was moulded
A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful…
