The Spectator
Australia
The rope, the chair & the noose
The war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed the outlook for the forthcoming federal election. It is unlikely, once the gravity…
Euro notes
Putin’s brutal imperialism Putin signalled early during his rule his fury that Moscow’s former empire had slipped the leash. After…
Australian Features
Old-fashioned realism could have avoided the Ukrainian crisis
The truth is the West lied to Gorbachev
Welcome to the new Dark Ages
The civilisation Australians are used to won’t last much longer
Many unhappy returns
The pandemic turns two in a world where freedom is under assault
Post-pandemic class struggles
Does Anthony Albanese understand the anger of blue-collar workers?
Features
Slugs and snails
Slugs and snails are the bane of every gardener who tries to grow strawberries, leafy and tuberous vegetables, flowering bulbs…
The Week
Silent censors
The arrest of a reporter who held up a poster during a Russian news broadcast criticising the war in Ukraine…
The truth about lies
The ex-Speaker John Bercow has been found to be a serial bully and serial liar. The ancients would have had…
Portrait of the week
Home More than 100,000 people registered interest in giving a place in their homes for Ukrainian refugees under a government…
Columnists
China’s focus is Covid, not a proxy war
It is tempting to believe that we have gone from one crisis to another: Russia invaded Ukraine hours after Covid…
The Spectator’s Notes
I remember my father telling me about Imre Nagy’s final broadcast before the Hungarian leader was taken by the Russians…
Biden is right: crypto world needs regulatory control
President Biden’s executive order ‘Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets’ won praise on all sides, an unfamiliar experience for one…
Would you stay or would you go?
For many of us war voyeurs watching the news with a glass of sherry, admiration of the little-engine-that-could Ukrainian fighters…
There’s no putting Putin in a box
At the heart of the West’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sits an ambiguity that it is convenient, perhaps…
Will the West’s unity against Russia last?
Over recent days I have been reflecting on War and Peace. Or Special Operation and Peace as it must now…
Books
Enduring legends
Once upon a time there was a collection of stories that everybody loved. They involved brave heroes such as Perseus…
Gone but not forgotten
Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses,…
Driven into the ground
Remember ashtrays in cars? Soon cars will themselves become objects of wet-eyed nostalgic reverie. A thrilling era of propelling ourselves,…
Dons and rebels
Paula Byrne describes life at Oxford University in its eccentric heyday
Bombs over Belfast
Caught outside at the start of a raid in the Belfast Blitz as the incendiary bombs rain down, Audrey looks…
A controlling monster
If vivid, drily hilarious tales about messy families stuffed with passive aggression and seething resentment are your thing, you will…
Knotty problems
Anne Tyler’s 24th novel French Braid opens in 2010 in Philadelphia train station. We find the teenage Serena, who has…
Arts
Not worth the price of admission
There are moments when you wish the theatre would just be swallowed up and be as if it had never…
Miller’s crossing
Bloody Difficult Women is a documentary drama by the popular journalist Tim Walker, which looks at the similarities between Gina…
Study in Scarlett
Without fanfare or apology, the Royal Ballet appears to have rehabilitated Liam Scarlett, but what a tragic balls-up it has…
Her dark materials
It took a moment to realise Keeley Forsyth was there. There were already three musicians, faint figures on a dark…
Away with the fairies
Scottish Opera’s new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to open in midwinter. Snow falls, fairies hurl snowballs…
Bunker mentality
Phantom of the Open is a comedy-drama telling a true story that would have to be true as no one…
Out of this world
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
An Englishwoman in Paris
A couple of years ago, I happened to read Graham Norton’s third novel Home Stretch. Rather patronisingly, perhaps, I was…
Life
Aussie life
Prime ministers rarely lose elections by bungling a single issue. An obvious benefit of the four-year term is that if…
Language
According to news reports Vladimir Putin expected his invasion and conquest of Ukraine to be a ‘cakewalk’. This is originally…
Establishing Rapport
Richard Rapport took first place at the Fide Grand Prix in Belgrade last weekend. The Hungarian grandmaster is now almost…
Puzzle no. 694
White to play. Rapport-Rogic, Austria 2010. Black threatens Qa1+ and then Rxf2+, so Rapport must strike at once. Which move…
Doomscrolling
In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the…
Diplomatic distractions
My dear friend Richard Stow is a most congenial fellow. A serious financial entrepreneur, he is also a clubman and…
2547: Ascending order
The (unrelated) unclued lights (one of three words, four of two words, (one with an apostrophe), one pair and two…
How to create a bottleneck
I spend quite a lot of time attacking what I call ‘motorway service station’ path design. More attentive readers of…
Free speech, Facebook and me
By the time you read this the new draft of the Online Safety Bill should be on the DCMS website.…
Black forest gateau
Kitsch is something of my stock-in-trade. And it doesn’t get more kitsch than Black Forest gateau. Pots of cream, pints…
Solution to 2544: Fives
First prize Leigh Hughes, Bootle, Merseyside Runners-up Francis Wheen, Pleshey, Essex; Robin Jolly, Selsey, Chichester, West Sussex
A life in limericks
In Competition No. 3240, you were invited to tell the life story of a well-known figure in three limericks. In…










































































