Tony Burke and Tanya Plibersek are laying down the ‘welcome’ mat for Islamist terrorists to take over the West Bank,…

It will get worse before it gets worse… This is how the head of French intelligence described the current state…

I am writing this diary from the Opera, not the theatrical sort, we are on a cruise ship anchored for…

Our moral decline should not include empathy for child molesters

Tony Abbott will be in trouble if he doesn’t heed the lessons of two imminent elections where Conservatives are floundering

Islamist terrorists prey on the vulnerabilities of the adolescent mind and the clash of cultures

Margaret Cunneen SC has fought a lonely battle against dark forces within our criminal justice system

The London Mayor on equality, unity and Lynton Crosby

The manifestos of a potential ‘progressive alliance’ pose a profound threat to the countryside

Election-day addresses from Andrew Roberts, Julian Fellowes, Michael Burleigh, Susan Hill, Robin Hanbury-Tenison and David Hare

The super-rich can shrug off Labour’s big tax idea. People like me will be forced out

Most survive the terrible journey. The next steps are less certain, for them and for Europe

These apps help people to make social connections — but at the cost, perhaps, of sexualising social life

There is a system that accounts for intensity of passion as well as idle opinion – hives have used it successfully for millions of years

Art, culture, fish soup and smelly soap — it’s all there

If Cameron loses on 7 May, those who can least afford it will suffer most

Home The British economy grew by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, the slowest quarterly growth for…

Plus: The madness of fossil-fuel reduction; and unwise, expensive Tory promises

Plus: How Miliband-style rent controls are already working; the riches of Len Blavatnik; and who gets wolf-whistled

Honduras is trying a new idea that worked very well 2,500 years ago

From ‘The Khalifate’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: It seems that the Ottoman Empire is likely to crumble away, and in that…

Plus: More remembrances of Raymond Carr; a new use for hair cuttings; and why selling off parsonages was a mistake

After 8 May, if Labour get in, it may be made illegal to disparage Islam. So I’d better get it out of my system

I love the British people. And I believe they are about to make a stupid and unfathomable mistake

Ed Miliband just went to meet the future of the media (under cover of darkness)

Plus: the homesick non-doms of HSBC; and some ways to reform inheritance tax

According to Zachary Leader’s latest biography, Saul Bellow was a great looter of life, rifling his most painful relationships for material for his novels

According to Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans, the collapse of the millennium-old empire triggered most of the problems that plague the Middle East today

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child offers disappointingly flimsy answers to some seriously important questions, says Sarah Churchwell

We can stop worrying about all those twentysomethings still living with their parents, according to Steven Mintz’s The Prime of Life. In an age of profound generational turmoil, they’ll probably do best in the end

Chris Fletcher wonders whether the couple who took over Kelmscott Manor during the 1940s noticed there was a war going on at all: they were too blitzed on sex, booze and Benzedrine to care

Jane Dawson’s biography of John Knox suggests that the strident leader of the Scottish Reformation may have had a sensitive side after all, says Eric Anderson

It’s peacetime and it’s snowing in the 12th instalment of Allan Mallinson’s tales of a cavalry officer: time for our hero to pause and review his career

According to Antony Sher’s Year of the Fat Knight — his account of playing Falstaff with the RSC — acting is a conveyor-belt job and not half as much fun as drawing or writing

Derek was straight out of Scott Fitzgerald, recalls Tom Stoppard, and his idea for a thriller about a double agent ordered to kill himself was absolutely brilliant

Some of us habitually quote Orwell’s correct comparison of producing first-person prose to ‘dosing yourself with some … very deleterious…

On their recent tour of the Americas, the Tallis Scholars had some surprising encounters - musical, literary and culinary

Plus: a David McVicar production from the Met forces Tanner to switch allegiances from Cav to Pag

It’s told at a cracking pace and, even though Matthias Schoenaerts’ British accent comes and goes, the casting is excellent

James Delingpole finds a new documentary about Rupert Murdoch’s journalist father - Gallipoli: When Murdoch Went To War - a fascinating eye-opener

Plus: Lore’s Story on Radio 4, a beautifully honest series of audio conversations about dementia and death

There are few things this conductor can’t do. But one art eludes him: good manners

Sensible birds fly to the warmth in the winter. Humans, not being birds and not always sensible, have to make…

A great magazine finally expired last week when it put such an obscenity as Kanye West on the cover

And why it's so hard to explain that to my parents

When I first started playing bridge, about 15 years ago, I ‘trained’ at TGR’s rubber bridge club, which was located…

British chess grandmaster Nigel Short has form when it comes to provocative statements. When competing in a tournament in France…

Black to play. This is from Short-Polgar, Madrid 1995. Judit Polgar is the strongest female -player ever, with an overwhelming…

In Competition No. 2895 you were invited to submit a poem describing a meal with a well-known poet. Sylvia Fairley…

The unclued lights (two of two words) are to be linked with one of the clued lights in translation. All…

The thematic unclued lights (4D, 20D, 34D, 40A and 41A+27A) are COUNTRIES, and the other unclued lights are their anagrams,…

Shame, really. He’d have loved the headmaster of Harrow’s jokes

Pretend to allow them to pay

Tourists inhabit a different city. This is a good place from which to watch  it

And Buckingham Palace doesn’t make the fume-filled streets near Victoria into a ‘Royal Quarter’