The Spectator
Australia
Morrison’s climate challenge
It is unacceptable for the Morrison government to carry on blindly ignoring the mounting evidence that far from being ‘settled’,…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
As you know, The Spectator Australia Political Research Bureau scours the globe searching for new ways in which the democratic…
Australian notes
Superglued to the Greens The great satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh once catalogued a fictional, remote and newly-converted Christian sect who…
Diary
The Holy Land. The Promised Land. The Land of Milk and Honey. Few countries have as many nicknames as Israel.…
Australian Features
Immigration and the demographic brioche
The Conversation is an online journal publishing commentary from Australian academics about current issues. It claims to present articles with…
An upside to invasion?
Nathan Moran, of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council in Sydney, kicked off Naidoc week by criticising the city’s publicly-funded…
Einstein, Marx and the scourge of suicide
Prime Minister Morrison’s commitment to addressing the escalating rate of suicide is commendable and much needed. Given 3,128 Australians committed…
Cancel culture
Everyone who hasn’t spent the last six months under a rock knows about Israel Folau and how he’s raised northwards…
Business/Robbery etc
It really is the greatest moral challenge of our time – and it’s not climate change. It is nationality versus…
Green notes
Renewables fail to pay their way The problem with continued calls for ‘sense’ in the Australian energy market including a…
Lies and the death of democracy
Words matter, concepts matter. Without a shared understanding of language we’d live in a world of chaos. Truth, in other…
Features
Cutting out Corbyn: could Tom Watson’s centrist ‘Momentum’ save Labour?
Ever since Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the Labour party, many of his MPs have dreamed of deposing…
I’m a doctor, and tried the new GP app. My experience was terrifying
Everyone agrees something dramatic has to be done to help the NHS. It is crumbling and the canary in the…
The hypocrisy of our politicians’ support for press freedom
Cynical old hacks like me have been amused by the chorus of establishment applause for the Mail on Sunday’s great…
Varadkar’s backstop gamble could cost Ireland dearly
‘The government has relished wearing the green jersey on Brexit and standing up to the British with the help of…
Why are there so few Polish people on British TV?
Have you ever seen a Pole on British television? Poles are the biggest immigrant group in Britain, numbering between 900,000…
Dangly earrings, hugs and controversy: here comes the new Bishop of Dover
East Kent is bracing itself. Its Church of England clergy are enjoying their last quiet months before Rose Hudson-Wilkin arrives…
Why nail-biting sports matches are good for mental health
Why do we need tie-breaks and photo finishes? If competitors have been nip-and-tuck all the way, why can’t they just…
The charm – and artifice – of the English cottage garden
The confusion is understandable. You arrive at Anne Hathaway’s Cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, keen to experience the quintessential cottage garden —…
The Week
It’s not just Scotland’s drugs shame – it’s Britain’s
Twenty years ago, the Scottish parliament was reconvened after a lapse of almost three centuries. The logic for devolution was…
Portrait of the week: Theresa May’s new role, England’s cricket victory and the world’s steepest street
Home In a televised debate between the rivals for election by members of the Conservative party as their new leader…
Nick Robinson: I’ve underestimated Boris ever since our Oxford clashes
By this time next week the Johnson era will surely have begun. ‘We can, we will, we must now escape…
When will man make it to Mars?
Mars missions When will there be a manned Mars mission? — As early as 1962, Nasa studied the practicalities of…
Roman plebs would have known how to tackle Corbyn’s cabal
Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to take serious action against Labour’s anti-Semitic members is no surprise: Marxists know who their friends are.…
Letters: Melissa Kite saved my life – twice
Leave we must Sir: It is interesting that as the Brexit process drags, people become more distanced from what was…
Columnists
What would Jane Austen say about Debrett’s going digital?
Seventy-five years ago on Saturday, the July plot failed. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg placed a bomb in a briefcase…
Will ‘chairman Boris’ revive cabinet government?
It has become something of a tradition in British politics: an incoming prime minister promises to restore proper cabinet government.…
The ethnicity pay gap just doesn’t add up
I suppose it was a bit naive to wander on to Newsnight having been booked to talk about Brexit and…
We Remainers aren’t going away
My voice is often recognised by people who don’t know me. My face, which is unmemorable, less so. But once…
The best response to hate speech is free speech
There’s a broad mainstream consensus on both sides of the Atlantic: Trump’s tweet telling four hard-left minority Congresswomen to ‘go…
Should we all be alarmed by Boris?
Back when Boris Johnson was editor of this magazine and MP for Henley, I was with him at a Tory…
Books
Words of war: interviews with the children who survived Hitler’s invasion of Russia
In 1990s Russia, war veterans were a bossy, even aggressive presence, upbraiding people in shops and pushing to the front…
Andreï Makine’s new novel is ‘masterful’
The Siberian-born novelist Andreï Makine has, as we say in the book world, a shedload of French literary bling. He’s…
How to train your husband
Around 25 years ago it became clear that there existed only two groups that could still be bullied by journalists…
It’s time we treated the moon with some respect
At the very back of the eye is a cluster of cells called ipRGCs. They are cells that don’t depend…
All of nature in a village in Norfolk
Walking home from work one day during the half-year I lived in London’s Maida Vale (almost three decades ago now),…
The problem of being, and writing
The venerable Oxford philologist Max Müller held that ‘mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth…
The novel Silicon Valley’s tech moguls won’t be amused to read
Silicon Valley moguls might not find Zed a particularly amusing read. Joanna Kavenna’s latest mindbender features the CEO of a…
Arts
From the NHS to Bayreuth: Norman Lebrecht talks to midwife-turned-opera singer Catherine Foster
Every summer for the past six years, Bayreuth has risen to its feet to acclaim an English Brünnhilde. Catherine Foster,…
A brief history of tea
It had to happen. Since almost everything became either ‘artisan’ or ‘curated’, conditions have been ripe for a curator of…
A sonic masterclass: the Silesian String Quartet at Wigmore Hall reviewed
Of all the daft notions about the classical music business, the daftest is that it’s a business at all. Seriously:…
Pure hagiography – the BBC’s Extinction Rebellion: Last Chance To Save The World?
I’m beginning to feel like Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers: almost the last person on Earth who…
How to talk to astronauts
Television has the pictures but the most spine-tingling moments in the recordings from the Apollo space missions are the bursts…
The greatest actor in the world couldn’t salvage David Hare’s batty adaptation: Peer Gynt reviewed
The National Theatre’s boss, Rufus Norris, has confessed that he ‘took his eye off the ball’ when it came to…
Completely and utterly and entirely blown away: the Lion King reviewed
The Lion King is Disney’s photorealistic CGI remake of the beloved, hand-drawn 1994 original that, for many children, offered a…
Paul Dyer conducting the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra
Only a person who is more or less my age can have a direct recollection of the 1953 coronation of…
Life
Let’s choose our politicians by random selection
Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…
Italy, in seven hours and five trains
The train standing at platform 1A had no air-conditioning and the heat was stupefying. Latecomers pressing into the carriage reacted…
Why won’t the police acknowledge that speeding coppers are a liability?
For a while, it seemed as if the only words my beloved would ever say again were ‘chicken Kievs’. Two…
One to watch: the 5lb claimer Theodore Ladd
Newmarket’s wisest trainer, Sir Mark Prescott, once noted: ‘The greyhound is propelled through the pain barrier by its desire to…
no. 563
White to play. This position is from Tal-Rantanen, Tallinn 1979. This game features a typically brilliant Tal finish. Can you…
When two becomes one
In Competition No. 3107 you were invited to provide an extract that is a mash-up of two well-known works of…
2417: Six Nations
One of the unclued entries (two words) can be followed by each of the others (two of three words, one…
to 2414: Matchplay
Conrad HILTON (2), Michael WILDING (37), Mike TODD (24), Eddie FISHER (3), Richard BURTON (30), John WARNER (31) and Larry…
I’m starting a trade union for intellectuals
I have just returned from Minneapolis after attending the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. That’s ‘intelligence’…
Why extravagant things don’t have to feel expensive
‘Suppose you bought a case of claret a few years ago for £20 a bottle. It now sells at auction…
Dear Mary: How should one react when someone invites you to an expensive restaurant — then lets you pay the bill?
Q. Further to your advice about how to refuse invitations, I had a friend, who sadly died young, who disliked…
The tastes of summer: polo, Pimm’s and plenty of Champagne
England. On a glorious summer afternoon in the Sussex countryside, I had been invited to watch polo at Cowdray Park,…
Must Harry and Meghan’s son really learn to ‘essentialise’ race?
‘Ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he’d made a joke. ‘Here’s one for you.’ He waved a page of…








































































