The Spectator
2 June 2018 Aus
Australia
Friends like these
The Liberal-National coalition lately has been showing signs of electoral recovery. Malcolm Turnbull’s and Scott Morrison’s budget was generally well-received.…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
The latest exercise in selective outrage to descend on the country is the response to the news that Barnaby Joyce…
Latham’s Law
In the Middle Ages, society had a long list of taboo terms, usually associated with witchcraft. In today’s politics, the…
Diary
For the past three weeks, London has been experiencing a glorious early summer: piercing blue skies, long warm evenings, the…
Australian Features
It’s time for primaries
Political class failure undermines the standing of our governments. Every ignored voter concern, project failure and moment of spin leaves…
Eyes on Gaza
Israel’s government is often accused of preventing a two-state solution by its actions but rarely are the decisions of Hamas…
What Rotherham means
The revelations of unhindered Muslim sex-trafficking of thousands of young girls in British towns, including Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxford, are…
Educating China
Imagine you are responsible for educating the children of China’s current leaders, many of whom may well go on to…
Tony’s trifecta
Surely it was obvious that, on any reasonable examination, Donald Trump was by far the better candidate in the 2016…
Business/Robbery etc
Australia’s current corporate leaders, the ‘managerial class’, are slowly destroying the capitalism that has made us such a great and…
Features
Europe has a democracy problem
This week the EU revealed its true nature. Rather than hand power to a Eurosceptic, the Italian President Sergio Mattarella…
Trump has turned the Mueller investigation on its head
Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former…
Twenty20 is making cricket great again
Blame it on a marketing survey. In 2001, the England and Wales Cricket Board commissioned the biggest piece of market…
Pope Francis raises the white flag
Just before Ireland voted overwhelmingly to end the country’s constitutional ban on abortion, Catholics in the fishing village of Clogherhead…
The countryside’s immigration problem
One day there won’t be anyone to deliver the mail any more, and then what will the City types do?…
What on earth’s happened to Waitrose?
A few years ago, some friends came to stay with us on Exmoor. After they unfurled from their Volvo, they…
Only the south of France could silence Henry James
‘Saint-Tropez?’ said the French mother of a friend. ‘C’est un peu… “tacky”.’ She was distressed to think of our taking…
The Week
It’s not for Westminster to decide Northern Ireland’s abortion law
Predictably enough, there have been no calls this week for the Irish referendum on abortion to be re-run, no complaint…
Portrait of the week: Ireland votes to legalise abortion; Pret A Manger sold; Italy plunged into crisis
Home Arlene Foster, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland, said that the referendum in Ireland on…
In my illness and old age, children give me hope
By 74 it is easy to feel that you have seen it all, done it all, that nothing much surprises…
Bolshevism: the enemy of democracy
From ‘News of the week’, 1 June 1918: Bolshevism is the negation of democratic government. There is no pretence on…
Letters: An extra 3 per cent won’t fix the NHS
What the NHS needs Sir: James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson are right (‘The great Tory health splurge,’ 26 May): an…
Columnists
The EU should go the way of the British Empire
To understand how the European Union works, and how it doesn’t, it helps to think of it as an empire.…
Could a eurozone crisis benefit Brexit?
Is it better to negotiate with a confident, optimistic European Union or a nervous, fretful one? Even Brexiteers are split…
When will the Tories learn: murdering animals isn’t a vote-winner
Buoyed by its huge popularity in the opinion polls and the fact that it is managing Brexit so well, the…
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s transgender superman
Comics aren’t what they used to be. In 1976 I was 11 — the perfect target audience for probably the…
WH Smith, Britain’s worst high-street retailer, is ripe for disruption
I’m not in the least surprised to learn that WH Smith has been voted Britain’s worst high-street retailer in a…
Books
The Empty Quarter is a great refuge for lonely hearts
Here’s a treat for desert lovers. William Atkins, author of the widely admired book The Moor, has wisely exchanged the…
‘Steer clear of that cave boy, James Dean, and grease ball, Elvis Presley’
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously…
The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner reviewed
Asked how he achieves the distinctive realism for which his novels and screenplays are famous, Richard Price, that sharp chronicler…
You didn’t have to be mad to work for Tommy Nutter — but it helped
The tailor’s art is a triumph of mind over schmatte. Not just in the physical cutting and stitching, but in…
Never Anyone But You, by Rupert Thomson reviewed
In a 2013 interview with a Canadian newspaper, Rupert Thomson acknowledged the strange place he occupies in the literary world.…
The Female Persuasion, by Meg Wolitzer reviewed
It’s because it’s the land of the loner that the United States is so loved or loathed. Yet to me…
Sher genius: Antony Sher’s account of playing King Lear
Why are rehearsal diaries so compelling? One approaches them with cynicism and then ends up reading with racing heart through…
A review of debut novels — from Lisa Halliday, Margaret Wilkersen Sexton, Matthew Klam and Anbara Salam
Publication of a debut novel is an experience comparable with the birth of a first child. Literary gestation is normally…
I hate fishing — but was hooked by the story of the Yukon’s salmon
‘Help!’ I thought, when I read the Author’s Note. ‘It’s about salmon, and I hate fishing.’ But by the first…
How I exposed the truth about My Lai
The humble title of Seymour Hersh’s memoir is somewhat at odds with the tone of the book. He says the…
Speeding along the highway in America’s coolest cars
In 1973, four years before he disappeared down the Star Wars rabbit hole, George Lucas directed the film American Graffiti,…
Are European cities really so much better than our own?
Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite…
Motherhood, by Sheila Heti reviewed
‘I don’t think this was something I ever felt’, Sheila Heti writes in Motherhood — ‘that my body, my life,…
The lovely curlew is wading into extinction
Mary Colwell, a producer at the BBC natural history unit, is on a mission: to save the British curlew from…
Missing, by Alison Moore reviewed
Whereas in an unabashed thriller, in the TV series The Missing, for example, the object of the exercise is well…
Arts
The buildings we knocked down in the name of ‘progress’
When the German novelist Sophie von La Roche visited Oxford Street in the 1780s she saw watchmakers and fan shops,…
Glyndebourne’s Der Rosenkavalier never forgets to be funny
‘Comedy for music by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Music by Richard Strauss.’ That’s what the creators of Der Rosenkavalier wrote on…
Understated and heartbreaking: BBC2’s King Lear reviewed
I recently came across a theory of the American poet Delmore Schwartz’s that Hamlet only makes sense if you assume…
No one but Michelle Terry would have hired Michelle Terry to play Hamlet
Regime change at the Globe. The new boss, Michelle Terry, wants a 50/50 ratio of males to females in each…
Patrick Heron’s paintings are exhilarating – his colours dance, pulse & boff you on the nose
Patrick Heron’s paintings of the 1950s melt like ice creams. You want to run your tongue along the canvas and…
I dread the extinction of boys’ choirs
One by one, cathedrals have succumbed to the inevitable. In blazes of publicity, with front-page photographs of girls in cassocks…
More immediate and even more vacuous than before: Chvrches’ Love Is Dead reviewed
Grade: B Another load of SJW moppets keening over 1980s synths. ‘It only takes two seconds to say: I don’t…
Ninety years old and still feels as fresh as a daisy: G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box reviewed
Two films this week, one that has stood the test of time, dazzlingly — it still feels as fresh as…
Only Radio 4 would allow Ian McKellan and Joanna Lumley to play Mr and Mrs God
One sphere that podcasts have so far not much penetrated is drama. Audible.co.uk is itching to develop its own brand…
Culture buff
George Bernard Shaw called it ‘a chronicle play’, I suppose a sort of docudrama if a superior one. Saint Joan…
Life
Were all those young lives lost at Normandy in vain?
I’m back in New York and digesting the five glorious days spent in Normandy. What was the fighting all about,…
Was our Airbnb host a closet toreador?
We were standing in the tiny hall: me, Catriona, Annette and her toy Yorkshire terrier, Ahmed. It was our first…
Now I know how the Karate Kid felt
Now I know how the Karate Kid felt. Two hours after I began oiling the newly laid deck in my…
The joys of early rising
Laikipia I wake at 4 a.m. these days. At that time you might hear a lion or a braying zebra,…
no. 508
Black to play. This is from Paulsen-Morphy, New York 1857. Having sacrificed his queen to expose the white king, Morphy continued…
2361: Snoot
Unclued lights are anagrams of eight words which are of a kind. Across 1 Result of hooker’s foul work?…
to 2358: Poem IV
The poem was ‘Composed upon WESTMINSTER (1A) Bridge’ by William WORDSWORTH (1D). The words are ASLEEP (20), DOMES (36), EARTH…
Why have I bought a car I don’t actually like?
I am currently in Brittany with the family, having made the 11-hour drive from London on Monday. It sounds like…
Gareth Bale’s megabucks are not a pretty sight
I must have missed the memo when it became compulsory for major football matches to operate as a marketing opportunity…
Dear Mary: Is it vulgar to give money as a wedding gift?
Q. I work at a desk by a window which looks out on to the street where I live. I…
Food that’s prettier than you are: The Petersham reviewed
The Petersham is a fading hotel on Richmond Hill. I went to a bar mitzvah there in 1986, which gives…
Like ‘gammon’, ‘spasmodic’ was a term to put down a despised tendency
To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September…
