PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

19 August 2023 Aus

Cheque mate

$100 million a day and Labor wants a blank cheque

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

Turn back the Wokes

Australians live in a dangerous era. The Prime Minister of the day, a communist sympathiser in his youth, wishes to…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

You would think that by now the Liberal party would have caught on to how political parties should promote their…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Dear John…

If your best friends won’t tell you, who will?

Features Australia

Getting grumpy – should I buy a guitar?

Illiberal policies are threatening our hard-won freedoms

Features Australia

Cheque mate

$100 million a day and Labor wants a blank cheque

Features Australia

A fight for the soul of the West

How the suits are emasculating the boots

Features Australia

Left, right, left

Labor’s factions march to the beat of the globalist drum

Features Australia

C’mon, Ref!

The ABC’s misconduct continues to be ‘breathtaking in its audacity’

Features Australia

The shoplifters Co-op

Petty crime is now being run by organised gangs

Features Australia

Return to assimilation or the gap will widen

Don’t be surprised if Albo abandons his blank-cheque referendum

Features

Features

The fellowship of the ring

Could a new gimmick help me find love?

Features

Kindred spirits

Students need a drunken freshers’ week

Features

Degrees of failure

Is university still worth it?

Features

Teutonic shift

The love affair between Britain and Germany is over

Features

Leagues apart

How to watch real football

Features

Cool it

he new head of the IPCC on the need to move beyond eco alarmism

Features

Letter from Albania

‘You’re late. About four years too late.’ The lady in the car-hire office gave a casual shrug and turned her…

Features

Textbook warfare

The Ukraine conflict has spread to Russia’s classrooms

The Week

Diary

Diary

Lee Anderson, deputy chairman of the Conservative party, popped a few monocles by saying asylum seekers reluctant to stay on…

Leading article

Identity crisis

This week Norfolk and Suffolk constabularies confessed that, replying to a freedom of information request, they had managed to release…

Columnists

Columns

Here come the Greens

So far, Keir Starmer has been unmoved by complaints from left-wingers that his policies differ little from those of Boris…

Columns

The great sociology con

My default mood at the moment is bleak despair, although it can sometimes be triggered into nihilistic loathing, which I…

Columns

Poor Prince Charming is on the scrap heap

The only strikes I really enjoy are actors’ strikes. Teachers’ strikes leave me cold. Train strikes get me into a…

Columns

Dog ice-cream: proof we’ve lost our minds

During the few hot days we had in June, I came across my first tub of dog ice-cream nestled among…

Books

More from Books

Magic tricks

Five short stories with male narrators – including a seahorse and a vampire – revolve around masculinity’s contradictory demands and the wish to belong

More from Books

Tangled threads

The painted-over figure of Baudelaire’s muse eventually emerging from Courbet’s great canvas provides one of many haunting images in this complex novel

More from Books

A burning passion

Clive Oppenheimer feels a deep kinship with the many volcanoes he has studied. When he is airlifted from Mount Erebus, he suffers ‘the heartache of leaving a lover’

More from Books

Feasts and fabrications

Japan’s ramen ‘tradition’ was created in 1958 to use up surplus imported flour, while Pizza Margherita’s specious royal connection helped boost Naples’s tourist trade

More from Books

Down in the woods today

With rewilding projects multiplying worldwide, brown, black and grizzly bears are making a bold comeback. But how much bear can we bear?

More from Books

Dickens’s magic lantern

Admirers of the novels have always enjoyed identifying their settings where possible, but Dickens’s old haunts are now mainly glimpsed in street names or blue plaques

More from Books

A trail of dirty money

In 2015, a dedicated DEA agent pursues a Mafia capo involved in a vast cocaine shipment, a Hezbollah militia leader and an elaborate Middle Eastern arms-trafficking ring

Lead book review

To have and to hold

Lauren Bacall was 25 years younger than Humphrey Bogart. Unlike his previous wives, she stayed – though Roger Lewis finds something creepy about their relationship

Arts

Australian Arts

Bob, Robbie & Robert

It’s fifty years they tell us since the creation of Utzon’s Opera House and it’s strange to think how this…

Television

Jesus returns

Some years ago, Mark Millar (the creator of Kick-Ass, Kingsman, etc.) hit on yet another brilliant conceit for one of…

Classical

Winging it

‘Audience Choice’ was the promise at the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Sunday matinee Prom, and come on – who could resist…

More from Arts

Ireland’s most polite bank robber

There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision…

Cinema

Going to the dogs

Based on the poster showing two cute dogs – a border terrier and a Boston terrier – I had assumed…

Rizal Van Geyzel races through his 60-minute set peppering the material with snatches of Chinese, Tamil and Malay

Festivals

Sister act

The Mitfords is a superb one-woman show by Emma Wilkinson Wright who focuses her attention on Unity, Diana and Jessica.…

Exhibitions

Riding high

In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…

Pop

Uneasy listening

I have always been fascinated by artists who bounce between tonal extremes when performing, particularly the ones who serve their…

Arts feature

All that remains

Barnaby Rogerson on how his collaboration with a great photographer has brought the ancient world very close

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

At the end of the second world war, socialists around the world still believed in the inevitable overthrow of capitalism…

Aussie Life

Language

We all know J.R.R. Tolkien from his epic The Lord of the Rings, voted best novel of the 20th century.…

More from life

Fish and chips

The last meal my parents had before I graced the world with my presence was fish and chips, so I…

Food

Homage to Hobbiton

Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should…

Spectator sport

Are the Red Roses due a routing?

England’s preparation for the upcoming rugby World Cup is beginning to look like a slow-motion car crash, after two pathetic…

No sacred cows

Who fact checks the fact-checkers?

Last week, a retired physics professor called Nick Cowern said it was time to get tough with ‘climate denialists’. ‘In…

Real life

Real life

‘What a worry the Ulez must be for you both,’ said a friend with a nod to the pick-up truck…

High life

High life

  On board Aello She was built in 1921, a beautiful wooden ketch that is as graceful to look at…