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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Laughing stock

A headline that includes the words ‘laughing stock’ over an image that includes a picture of former prime minister Malcolm…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

Until recently, I thought that Australia was free from the scourge of activist judges. But in view of events of…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Encouraging assassinations

The left must answer for modern political violence

Features Australia

Taylor tinkers with tough talk on immigration

But is he saying anything that hasn’t been tried and failed in the UK?

Features Australia

If it’s bad here, it’s worse in the mother country

Once you start investigating your own soldiers, it never ends

Features Australia

Zero debt

Jimbo fiddles the 20-year anniversary

Features Australia

How feminism demoralises young women

The ideological subversion of an entire generation of Western girls

Features Australia

Once a jolly jihadist

The war crimes Australia won’t prosecute

Features

Features

The inverted imperialism of the royal visit

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Christian Turner, the UK’s new ambassador in Washington. He’s only been in post…

Notes on...

In defence of celebrity rosé

Alan Watkins, the late parliamentary sketch writer, told a story about his time on the Sunday Express in the 1960s.…

Features

Is the country ready for Chancellor Ed Miliband?

When Morgan McSweeney concluded his evidence on Tuesday to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee about the Mandelson affair, a senior…

Features

What your whippet says about you

‘Whippets are simply ducal,’ a grand friend pants at me in her drawing room when I ask her why she…

Features

Shameless Britain: we are a nation of shoplifters

It’s been more than a week since Sean Egan, a manager at Morrisons in Aldridge, announced that he’d been sacked…

Features

March of the Greenshirts: Polanski’s party are the real racists

‘Back us to stop the far right,’ say the Greens. But what if parts of the Greens are the far…

Features

My miracle match against the Vatican’s cricket team

Many have come to Rome seeking spiritual guidance: Thomas à Becket, Lord Byron, Lionel Richie. I came for a different purpose:…

The Week

Barometer

Which world leaders survived the greatest number of assassination attempts?

Marathon sprints The Kenyan marathon runner Sabastian Sawe broke the world record by running the first official sub-two-hour marathon. –…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Starmer avoids ethics inquiry, Birmingham’s bin strikes end and Trump is targeted by a gunman

Home The House of Commons voted 335 to 223 against a Conservative-led motion to refer Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime…

Leading article

In the local elections, think local

In March, just before Artemis II rounded the far side of the Moon, the Transport Secretary had her own lunar…

Diary

The secret to Rupert Murdoch’s strength

Going to the theatre is a joy. When you are a character on the stage, less so. Over the past…

Ancient and modern

Zack Polanski must dream of Athens’s radical democracy

A Greek essayist c. 420 BC argued that Athens’s radical democracy, giving the vote to every adult male citizen, resulted…

Letters

Letters: the little-known role of liquorice in parliamentary history

Pennies pinching Sir: I agree with much of this week’s editorial, except for two points (‘Nunc dimittis’, 25 April). As…

Columnists

The Spectator's Notes

Can you answer this quiz intended for seven-year-olds?

‘Modernity’ is often behind the times. On Wednesday, parliament pushed out all remaining hereditary peers, although we live in an…

Columns

Is Reform now Scotland’s leading unionist party?

In Scotland, a changing of the guard is near. But while Hearts are set to break the duopoly of Celtic…

Columns

When will we admit that the special relationship does not exist?

It was to King Charles’s great credit that he refused to fall for the Trump power handshake thing and instead…

Columns

The ‘sensible’ class is losing control of the House of Lords

The House of Lords is often described as ‘the best private members’ club in London’. Certainly, it has an appearance…

Columns

With a shudder, I’m voting Labour in the local elections

You may be disturbed by a column urging whites (among others) to vote as a bloc in the coming local…

Columns

My night under fire at the White House correspondents’ dinner

Last Saturday evening, the American media class descended for its annual jamboree of back-slapping at the Washington Hilton. Protestors outside…

Any other business

I’ll dare to say what Andy Haldane doesn’t

A sandwich with Andy Haldane, the former Bank of England economist, now president of British Chambers of Commerce, is the…

Books

More from Books

Were Britain’s postwar dons just having too much fun?

Hugh Trevor-Roper, for whom the university was a place of pleasure as well as learning, identifiedas early as 1951 a ‘party of darkness’ focusing on administrative efficiency and dullness

More from Books

How Syria’s dream of freedom ended in further repression

Anand Gopal traces events through the lives of six rebels, from the first stirrings against Assad to the latest protests against corruption

More from Books

The doyen of the France’s culinary scene is unmasked

Robert Courtine, the revered food critic and Le Monde columnist for four decades, turns out to have been a devotee of Hitler and ferocious anti-Semite

More from Books

A foolproof way of predicting the future

Nostradamus’s prophecies are so poetic that they can be taken to foretell almost anything, while the American clairvoyant Jeane Dixon also managed to cover every possibility

More from Books

In praise of uncertainty over hollow conviction

Using his life as a case study, Brian Dillon sets out to demonstrate that education is just as much about questioning things as it is about obtaining answers

More from Books

The land of missed opportunity: The Left and the Lucky, by Willy Vlautin, reviewed

A bullied eight-year-old forms a bond with his caring, middle-aged neighbour in a heartbreaking novel of modern America’s underclass

More from Books

The art of printmaking in all its glorious complexity

Holly E.J. Black highlights the differences between the feathery delicacy of an etching, the bold forms of a linocut and the carved sinews of an ancient woodblock

More from Books

A meditation on reality: Transcription, by Ben Lerner, reviewed

In a short, glittering novel, Lerner shows how the factual is always infused with the fictional as he explores the tension between the given and the constructed

More from Books

Weeds, bugs and lichens must now thrill the imagination

Muted, scrubby grasslands rather than rolling green fields are what excite the naturalist John Wright – and the buzz of stinging insects

Lead book review

How interwar Germany became a breeding ground for evil

The permissiveness of the 1920s led to an autocratic backlash, with ‘the entire class representing intellectual Germany’ becoming ‘Nazi-infested’, according to the diplomat Harry Kessler

Arts

Australian Arts

Skill of the characterisation

Yasmina Reza is one of the most dazzling playwrights alive because she creates sweepingly funny bits of theatre (masterfully translated…

Cinema

What have they done to The Devil Wears Prada?

The Devil Wears Prada (2006) is one of those films which, if chanced upon when flicking television channels, I will…

Television

In a fairer world, The Cage would receive a lot more attention than Half Man

Half Man, Richard Gadd’s follow-up to the all-conquering Baby Reindeer, began with approximately ten seconds of some people at a…

Classical

The magic ears of Hyperion

How do we evaluate Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto series, which over a period of 35 years recorded more than 200…

Pop

Big Thief is this generation’s R.E.M.

By the time Adrianne Lenker of Big Thief was born in 1991, Kim Gordon had already released seven albums with…

Theatre

Why actors love to play lunatics

One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, adapted from Ken Kesey’s book by Dale Wasserman, is exactly like the movie but…

The Listener

Is this the missing link between Bach and Haydn?

Grade: B ‘Is that Haydn or Mozart? One can’t always be sure,’ remarks Kenneth Clark in the 18th-century episode of…

Exhibitions

The weakness of the V&A East Museum

I’d just emerged from Stratford station when I realised it had been almost a decade to the day since I’d…

Dance

How good is Wayne McGregor?

‘Professor Sir Wayne McGregor CBE’ runs the headline to a biographical essay in the programme for the Royal Ballet’s triple…

Arts feature

The dirty secrets of the Royal Festival Hall

The Festival of Britain – that much mythologised moment of national renewal – is wheeled out every time the country…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

How do you write satire when you are up against a literary festival? It writes itself. I have been leafing…

Aussie Life

Language

There are some silly people (in the US more than here) who like to claim that President Trump is suffering…

More from life

The extraordinary simplicity of oeuf mayonnaise

‘Sometimes, in the search for originality, the most obvious dishes are forgotten,’ says Elizabeth David, the doyenne of cookery, in…

The turf

My meeting with ‘The Godfather’ of flat racing

Trainer John Gosden is a colossus in Newmarket, the centre of the horse-racing industry. Two-and-a-half-thousand horses are trained here and…

Competition

Spectator Competition: Ouch

Competition 3447 invited you to outdo Kingsley Amis in detailing a hang-over from hell, but in the style of another…

Food

‘A constant good in this world’: Simpson’s in the Strand reviewed

Simpson’s in the Strand is a dream palace, and its fortunes are as tidal as the river. It is on…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: how can I prevent my daughter from getting ‘tweakments’?

Q. My husband has been appointed to a post in Wales and we as a family have moved here for…

Real life

I wanted to rescue this waiter

‘Something I like to do with all my tables is ask what brings you here today?’ said the young waiter…

Sport

In London, Sabastian Sawe demolished the impossible

Suddenly last Sunday in London nearly 60,000 amateur runners were able to say they had competed in a race in…

Still Life

People who say it’s no good throwing money at a problem have never been poor

It started during the bus journey from Glasgow to Edinburgh airport on the way home to Provence. Saying goodbye is…

No sacred cows

Worried your child is being radicalised? Try this tip

A couple of weeks ago, the Guardian published an article entitled: ‘“I feel like I’m losing her”: the families torn…