Since the Prime Minister’s petulant and angry election night spray, he and his government have looked anything but in control.…

Blasphemy is back The ACT government abolished the crime of blasphemy in 1996. Earlier this month, they brought it back.…

In 14AD, the Roman Emperor Tiberius, an unlovable man who succeeded the far superior Augustus, successfully managed a census of…

Three cheers for the government for saving us from the Yellow Investment Peril. If it weren’t for Treasurer Scott Morrison,…

The Liberal factional powerbroker-lobbyists disaster in NSW now belongs to Malcolm Turnbull. Failure to prevent the exercise of lobbyist power…

Why do some governments behave as if they’re little more than thieves in the night? Why is it that the…

Religion has no part to play in public policy, according to TV producer Andrew Denton — even when it comes…

Ulrich Zwingli (1484-1531) the great Protestant reformer of the sixteenth century would have been impressed with the determination shown by…

Disgracefully, an Australian university is introducing ‘trigger warnings’

‘We have fallen upon evil times, politics is corrupt and the social fabric is fraying.’ Who said that? Donald Trump…

Ravenna At a car park a short walk from Dante’s tomb, one of the gang of illegal immigrants who tell…

Never forget Atlanta. Every time a British athlete wins a gold medal at the Olympic Games in Rio, remember the…

There is no party in Britain quite as fake as the Scottish National Party. The SNP, now entrenched in its…

The long civil war in Syria is still far from conclusion. Any real possibility of rebel victory ended with the…

‘Farm cottage available, Dorset. Long or short let. £5 per week.’ I was looking for a writing bolthole, so I…

She had come a very long way from the shtetl, but Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Guggenheim was still the poor relation of…

Four-letter surveys A judge at Chelmsford Crown Court who was sworn at by a man she was sentencing to jail…

Because no country can interfere in another’s legal system, there is little the UK can do to help the six…

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 19 August 1916: The Parliamentary Air Committee having recently inhaled much ozone at…

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, who was supposed to be on a walking holiday in Switzerland, wrote to Xi…

Appreciating cartoonists Sir: Brendan O’Neill’s essay on Bill Leak’s (in)famous cartoon reminded me how much we should appreciate our cartoonists.…

Throughout our holiday, reports from Rio rippled in — last thing at night, first thing in the morning — a…

A man in Austria has been sentenced to three months in prison for posting a picture of his cat on…

How strange it is that an obscure Tsarist prison warder in Odessa is commemorated forever in thousands of tiny, irritable…

When you vote in Britain, there is a relaxed feeling in the polling stations. This is a long-established part of…

On Monday 25 July we climbed Cader Idris. No particular reason except a free Monday and a memory of what…

Brexit Britain fills me with calm. Six weeks on, there’s no point pretending otherwise. Losing is far better than winning.…

The revelation by actuarial consultants Lane Clark & Peacock that 56 of the supposedly blue chip companies in the FTSE 100…

Stuff I have learnt after two solid weeks watching the Olympics on TV. 1. Tennis and golf shouldn’t be Olympic…

In a piece of light verse from the 1770s ‘Dame Nature’ — out strolling ‘one bright day’ — bumps into…

Hillbilly Elegy is an extended meditation on cultural and social capital. It asks seriously – and answers truthfully – this…

Early on in his excellent and protean biography of a colour, Spike Bucklow quotes Goethe, writing in 1809: Every rope…

With a title like A Beautiful Young Wife, this is of course about the decline of an older husband. Professor…

The Schooldays of Jesus is not, as it happens, about the schooldays of Jesus. It is the Man Booker-nominated sequel…

Now that even candidates for President of the United States can rise up from the undead dregs of reality television,…

A teenager in the second decade of the Cold War, my father was taught to play snooker by a KGB…

Architecture is sometimes described as the second oldest profession, but often — in both theory and practice — it competes…

Perhaps because so many of them are former drunks and junkies, ‘addiction experts’ are touchy people. Often they don’t like…

Mark Lawson’s latest novel, set in Britain in the recent past, presents us with a nation in the grip of…

What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task…

‘We think we’re in charge of this stuff but we’re not,’ said Quincy Jones, the composer, arranger, jazz trumpeter, musical…

‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to…

Forty years ago, I spent 14 hours in a large field near the A1 in Hertfordshire. I had just taken…

The second half of the Bolshoi tour brought much fresher fare than the first: following the ubiquitous warhorses Don Quixote…

Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades is probably his greatest opera, certainly the one in which his characteristic strengths are on…

I should probably nail my colours to the mast and state that The Office is possibly my favourite TV sitcom…

Dominic Frisby is an actor best known for voicing the booking.com adverts (‘Booking dot com, booking dot yeah’). Voiceover specialists…

The perimeter squares yield six theme-words in order, though any one of them can come first. The remaining unclued lights…

Whenever I try to use the NHS I end up feeling like Bruce Willis’s character in The Sixth Sense. No…

Bridge players love going on about system. Some want every bid to have a conventional meaning and some want to…

It seems like a long time ago, but back in the day, when Sir John Major launched the National Lottery,…

White to play. This is a position from Adams-R. Pert, British Championship, Bournemouth 2016. What is White’s most direct route…

After the misery of going abroad for the summer holidays for the past few years, I’m now happily back in…

The Sail Loft is under a castle on a mountain on an island in the sea; for that, I could…

After 30 years in racing it is a little late in Rab Havlin’s career to suggest that he will suddenly…

Grandmaster Michael Adams turned in a superlative performance earlier this month to win the British Championship for the fifth time.…

In Competition No. 2961 you were invited to submit limericks that might have been written by Boris Johnson in an…

All but one of the unclued lights can be preceded by DOCTOR (or in one case DOC). The title also…

The post Battle for Britain appeared first on The Spectator.

Q. My partner and I have been living together for 26 years, but now that he’s asked me to marry…

When I ran out of space last week, I was about to mention the way in which some people relish…

An item in an American newspaper had me thinking of my father all last week. Old dad died 27 years…

I took the only spare chair on the terrace of the Modern bar, one of four bars on this Provençal…

In the four months since I had a brain haemorrhage I have had several tests to find out how my…