PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

18 September 2021 Aus

Glad the Impaler

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

Glad the Impaler

The New South Wales government press release proudly announcing ‘freedom for the fully vaccinated’ is a document of shame, and…

Australian Columnists

Latham's Law

Latham’s law

Pull the other one, Dom There’s a lot of talk about what the Australian economy will look like post-Covid. In…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Australia fails the character test

Bad actors take centre-stage in our Covid Theatre

Features Australia

Voting 1 for ‘least-bad’

Slim pickings at the polling booth, yet again

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

When the chips are down, look to Japan

Features Australia

Xi’s Great Leap Backwards

How to create a personality cult without, er, a personality

Features Australia

Fleas thrive in the grey zone

We are already at war, but we just don’t realise it

Features Australia

Poison pill

‘Who guards the guardians?’ asked Juvenal in his sixth Satire, in the second century. He was referring to corruptible lechers…

Features

Features

All bar none

There’s more to the pub than just drink

Features

Art nouveau

Are NFTs memes – or masterpieces?

Features

Last rights

Assisted suicide is neither painless nor dignified

Features

Payday

Who’s afraid of rising wages?

Features

So long, truckers

How a once fun job lost its charm

Features

Our man in Rwanda

When will Britain wake up to the horror of Paul Kagame’s rule?

Notes on...

Passports

The Egyptologist Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson interprets drawings in a tomb in Thebes as persons queuing up to have passports…

Features

A load of Kabul

Britain’s empty asylum promises

The Week

Leading article

An immigration amnesty

Many feared mass unemployment as a fallout from Covid-19. Instead, we have ended up with the opposite problem: a labour…

Diary

Diary

During one of the interminable lockdowns I mentioned that I didn’t care if I never went to another launch party…

Ancient and modern

The game of life

The extraordinary sporting achievement of Emma Raducanu and the response it has received from royalty and politicians alike makes one…

Letters

Letters

A kick up the assetocracy Sir: While it was heartening to see Fraser Nelson take a stand against the ‘assetocracy’…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home The government decided to offer booster vaccinations to those over 50. Children aged 12 to 15 would be offered…

Columnists

Any other business

Don’t scrap start-up grants for wannabe entrepreneurs

I’m hugely enjoying meeting the finalists for The Spectator’s Economic Innovator of the Year Awards. This year’s bumper entry was…

Columns

The truth about lies

There were two remarkable things about Emma Raducanu’s wonderful win at the US open last week. The first was the…

Columns

What’s the Tory majority for?

One of the things that distinguishes Boris Johnson from the last three Tory prime ministers is that he has a…

Columns

Little people, big nightmare

I think it’s for the best if we ban all children’s books containing the word ‘dream’. Dream big, little dreamer,…

Columns

Let’s have more diversity at the BBC

I noticed with interest that Gigalum island — off the Kintyre peninsula in Argyll — was up for sale for…

Books

More from Books

The war that changed the world

It was not a war to end all wars, writes James Howard-Johnston at the start of this illuminating and thought-provoking…

More from Books

A family pilgrimage

It seemed like a preposterous proposition. For decades, Iain Sinclair has been an assiduous psychogeographer of London, an eldritch cartographer…

More from Books

The scramble for affluence

In the winter of 1992, the retired octogenarian Deng Xiaoping toured China’s southern coasts. From there he gave a spirited…

More from Books

The ever-changing scene

It must have been shortly after my first performance of Not I in London in 2005 when Matthew Evans, the…

More from Books

Mann’s secret desires

In a letter to Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika sight unseen in order to…

More from Books

A brainwave… or not

We open with Theo, our narrator, and Robin, his son, looking at the night sky through a telescope. ‘Darkness this…

Lead book review

Into the woods

Anyone who spends time among trees senses how good that is for their physical and mental wellbeing, says Ursula Buchan

Arts

Australian Arts

Diane Lane

It was doubly sad the other night to see Virginia Gay deliver a speech from her Covid-cancelled Cyrano on the…

Arts feature

Giving the devil his due

The Sopranos – the greatest television show in history – far outshines its progenitors, says Tanya Gold

Cinema

No cojones

It’s a hard heart that doesn’t warm to the musical drama Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. I don’t have a hard…

Television

Sub standard

Tense, claustrophobic, gripping, thrilling, realistic: just some of the adjectives no one is using to describe BBC1’s Sunday night submarine…

Exhibitions

The yumminess of paint

‘Painting has always been dead,’ Willem de Kooning once mused. ‘But I was never worried about it.’ The exhibition Mixing…

Classical

Teenage kicks

For a one-hit composer, we hear rather a lot of Pietro Mascagni. His reputation rests on his 1890 debut Cavalleria…

Pop

Hot metal and methadrine

They may no longer get many teenagers at their shows spending all their money on merchandise, then throwing up on…

Radio

Crime and punishment

How do we have difficult conversations? Especially in an age of polarisation, where everything is immediately politicised? But also where…

Theatre

Cold spell

Frozen the musical declares war on woke politics. The 2013 Disney movie has been turned into a song-and-dance show that…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life

When maverick ex-New York Times reporter Alex Berenson said that the Covid-19 jabs didn’t stop infection or transmission, and were…

Aussie Life

Aussie Language

When Extinction Rebellion vandalised Parliament House they were engaging in ‘stuntism’— a word that was coined by Mark Latham. When…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle No. 671

White to play. Gaprindashvili–Servaty, Dortmund 1974. The dark squares around Black’s king are critically weak, and White found an accurate…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2521: Leading question

The question was ‘What is THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY(-)NINTH PRIME NUMBER’ (7A/10/22/40/16/31/32/28)? The answer is 2521, the number of…

Competition

Rock god

In Competition No. 3216, you were invited to retell a well-known biblical story in a secular style that would enhance…

Chess

Detecting vulnerabilities

I suspect many players perceive the chess board in rich contrast, like a heat map. Glowing bright red are those…

Crossword

2524: Spelean II

Clockwise round the grid from 20 runs a quotation minus one word (1,2,4,4,4,1,4,1,5,4,4,9) followed by an honest servant’s name. Unclued…

Mind your language

Roll out

I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the…

Low life

Low life

With a French health card everything is free for us cancer patients, even taxis to and from the hospital. ‘This…

Food

News from nowhere

The residents of Mayfair are misnamed: they do not really live here. They live in Mayfair like I live on…

Spectator sport

Two class acts

Not many people would have seen that coming. I’m talking of course of last Saturday evening and the women’s final…

High life

High life

Memories for me are like beautifully edited copy: all cleaned up and retaining only the good parts. The wife tells…

The turf

The turf

The emphasis may all be on speed horses these days, with breeders interested only in horses that struggle to get…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Your problems solved

Q. I recently attended a wedding which was (for me) quite ‘grand’, with a church ceremony followed by a reception.…

Bridge

Bridge

‘Table presence’ is a funny old expression in bridge. You might think it means what it would in any other…

No sacred cows

Free schools are victims of their own success

For the founders of the West London Free School, of which I was one, last Thursday should have been a…

Real life

Real life

The two-acre smallholding lived up to its name in being very, very small indeed. We had to squeeze around the…