The Spectator
2 February 2019 Aus
Hat(e) crime
Australia
A chink of Newspoll light
Prime Minister Scott Morrison must be wondering what he did right. This week’s first Newspoll of the year has Bill…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
The absurd contribution by Thomas Vargas, the head of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Indonesia, to the refugee issue…
Australian notes
For me, at least, this year’s Australia Day was preceded somewhat significantly two days earlier by a vast four page…
Australian Features
What if it were Auxit?
Imagine if after the 1999 referendum when a majority of Australians voted against a republic the government decided that it…
Features Australia, New Zealand
Fake New Zealand
That sleeping giant, the public, is waking up this side of the Tasman, but late to redress the reality that…
Five go mad for Brexit
Every scorching Australian summer I like to dust off my Enid Blyton books and return to the country lanes, tumble-down…
Rahaf’s flight
Rahaf Al-Qunun’s predicament became a cause célèbre in the West. Her plight, which is sadly familiar to many Muslim women,…
An endless coup
Do those campaigning against our national day really think that Australia, as we know it, would be here without the…
Business/Robbery etc
Business generally finds nothing unusual or disturbing about otherwise inconsequential Liberal politicians achieving their once-only 15 minutes of notoriety (let’s…
Features
Theresa May has been given a second chance to save Brexit. She’d better not blow it
Theresa May will soon arrive in Brussels with a series of unlikely demands. She must tell the European Union that…
Europe still thinks Britain will come out worse from Brexit. Bless
In Paris in December, I sat with a journalist friend in a café on the Boulevard Auguste-Blanqui and listened to…
Fear and foie gras: a Caracas notebook
A man stopped me in the street in Caracas and grabbed my hand. I was alarmed, but tried not to…
The massive NHS plan to record every single person’s DNA
‘Gene test for sale on NHS,’ blared the headlines last weekend, sparking some anxiety and confusion. The story is that…
I’ve had enough of induction hobs — and I know I’m not the only one
It was a close-run thing for my friend who’s having a new kitchen installed in her house in Chiswick. After…
Addicts love talking about their addiction – but haven’t we suffered enough?
I have always found the parable of the Prodigal Son sickeningly unfair, and I felt this again while driving a…
True crime has never been more popular, but it often forgets the families left behind
I’ve talked to Denise Horvath-Allan more than my own mother this year. Denise’s son Charles went missing while backpacking in…
The big difference between a pile of stones and Piles of Stones
There are piles of stones and then there are piles of stones. Anyone can place one rock upon another, but…
The Week
After Huawei, can we trust Chinese tech?
The world is a better place for China’s emergence from behind the bamboo curtain where it hid for half a…
Portrait of the Week: Brexit rumbles on, a panda escapes and Denmark builds a fence
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, set off to seek a change to the Irish backstop of the EU withdrawal…
The story of Alex Salmond is (far) stranger than fiction
For legal reasons I shouldn’t say much about the Alex Salmond case, but it does bolster the argument that the…
On political tribalism
From The Spectator, No. 152, 24 July 1711: There cannot a greater judgment befall a country than such a dreadful…
Sick of award ceremonies? So were the ancients
All over the world, from Armenia (the Silver Apricot) to India (the Golden Conch) and the UK (the Shaftas, honest),…
Letters: why are we paying so much attention to vegans?
Vegan excess Sir: As a lifelong vegetarian I am heartily sick of vegans and of the amount of attention that…
Columnists
Is it society’s job to stop people singing racist jokes?
Where would you rather come from, Pakistan or Liverpool? Assuming you were somehow given a retrospective choice in the matter.…
Why are we allowing ourselves to be held to ransom by has-been Irish militants?
When politics goes round in circles, the columnist inevitably revisits issues that would have been sorted if only everyone read…
The super rich aren’t all bad – some even pay their taxes
Paying tax — which many of us have been doing this week before HMRC’s 31 January deadline — is a…
Could Kamala Harris be the Democrats’ dream antidote to Trump?
Washington, DC It’s no secret that President Donald Trump has women problems. His relationship with his wife seems strained. Feminists…
The EU’s hard-border bluff will soon collapse – and then it can get serious about Brexit
The House of Commons does work better than it seems to, I promise you. When a big subject comes up,…
Books
How Eric Hobsbawm remained a lifelong communist — despite the ‘unpleasant data’
Sir Richard Evans, retired regius professor of history at Cambridge, has always been a hefty historian. The densely compacted facts…
An intellectual dynasty: the Darwins, Wedgwoods and their notable intermarriages
Readers of Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage will remember that its author set out to write a life of…
Demography has become the biggest story on the planet
One of my vanities is that all my novels are different. Yet one astute journalist identified a universal thread: ‘Too…
The end of the world is nigh: the latest short stories reviewed
Only Helen DeWitt would start a book with an epigraph of her own pop-culture mash-up poetry and end with an…
Kazakhstan is about the size of Europe — but we know almost nothing about it
Kazakhstan, say signs by the side of the road in this vast Central Asian country, is ‘a land of unity…
Our public schools now resemble five-star hotels — with a Russian and Asian clientele
Deplore it or revere it, you cannot but respect the private school industry’s wart-like survival in modern Britain. Has any…
The Australian James Joyce: the novels of Gerald Murnane reviewed
Gerald Murnane is the kind of writer literary critics adore. His novels have little in the way of plot or…
Where would we be without crime’s heavies? Muscle, by Alan Trotter, reviewed
Let’s hear it for the heavies, the unsung heroes of noir crime fiction on page and screen. The genre would…
Spinning yarns: uplifting stories told through needlework
In this unusual book, part memoir, part history, Clare Hunter offers a personal meditation on the textile arts. Sewing and…
The hot-headed youth who played straight into Hitler’s hands
On 7 November 1938, the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan walked into the German embassy in Paris. Claiming to have secret papers,…
Cycle of violence: Blood, by Maggie Gee, reviewed
Maggie Gee has written 14 novels including The White Family, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s…
Arts
Dau is the strangest and most unsettling piece of art to come out of Russia in years
Dau is not so much a film as a document of a mass human experiment. The result is dark, brilliant…
Only adults struggle with The Magic Flute. Kids get it
Spoiler alert: it’s all a dream. At least, I think that’s what we’re meant to take away from the business…
The attempt to bring back topicality to Ambridge has been far too effective
It’s becoming clear that the travails afflicting all the major players in The Archers, Radio 4’s flagship drama, are intended…
Why Gomorrah could never have been made by the BBC
Boy often likes to rebuke me for having impossibly high standards when it comes to TV. ‘Why can’t you just…
Terry Hall on depression, punch-ups and falling out of love with the Labour party
It was summer 1981, and the towns and cities of Britain were alight. There had been riots in Brixton, south…
Rivetingly moving: Can You Ever Forgive Me? reviewed
Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a true story based on the 2008 memoir of Lee Israel, the writer who…
The odd couple: Bill Viola / Michelangelo at the RA reviewed
The joint exhibition of Michelangelo Buonarroti and Bill Viola at the Royal Academy is, at first glance, an extremely improbable…
Not quite scary or clever enough for legendary status: Resident Evil 2 reviewed
Grade: B Resident Evil 2 takes the original zombie shooter, which has become a cult classic and, to many, the…
A winning hoax: When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other reviewed
The NT’s new play is an update of Pamela, a sexploitation novel by Samuel Richardson. It opens with Stephen Dillane…
Best production The Harp in the South
We are in the middle of the awards season for the entertainment industry. There have been the Golden Globes and…
Life
Why New York loves John Bercow
‘The British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.’ This is a…
What Sylvia learned at the constipation clinic
‘The whole of my life I’ve had difficulty.’ I heard Sylvia say this through the door, which was slightly ajar.…
My old horse was tough, ferocious and violent – and I loved her as much as she loved me
Under a blood moon, that was how Tara went down in the end. The old chestnut mare sure knew how…
My miraculous winning streak
Last Saturday morning, Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google, was on the radio explaining his algorithm for happiness,…
A tale of two tournaments
The start of the year sees the elite of the chess world divided between Wijk aan Zee in Holland and…
no. 539
Black to play. This is from Howell-Bilguun, Gibraltar 2019. How can Black play for the win? Answers to me at…
Tweet beginnings
In Competition No. 3083 you were invited to submit a poem or a short story that begins ‘It started with…
2393: Monster Mash-up
1D (two words) 15 10 26 né 21 died on 2 February. Most famous for 7A 37 and 14, he…
2390: Tea Shop
The theme word is GRASS (for which the title is a cryptic clue). 1A, 1D, 6 and 37 are informers;…
An inconvenient truth: white children are underperforming everyone else in UK schools
The Department for Education (DfE) published its finalised data on the 2018 GCSE results last week, revealing that, for the…
Why HS2 doesn’t stand up to the test of time
In past years, I have been a critic of HS2. I might now change my mind. One simple tweak might…
Dear Mary: Should I ever tip at a private club?
Q. I am an artist living in the UK and was charmed to be invited by a fellow artist, a…
Is wine an art?
Acouple of lawyers were disagreeing about a matter which could become increasingly relevant. Could a sitting president pardon himself? But…
Names, like drink, go by fashion
‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a…
