Ronald Reagan was 77 years old in his final year in office running the free world. And he made a…

The Biennale The Venice Biennale has been a rite of every second spring since 1895. The oldest biennial art fair…

Stealing Shorten’s shorts In 1845 Benjamin Disraeli said of Britain’s Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, that he had ‘caught…

The budget week just gone has marked the moment when both sides of politics officially gave up on budget repair…

Donald Trump has identified a phenomenon in the Western media which many suspect and which believers in a free press…

It’s one of the few bits of Liberal economic policy left in the budget – and judging by the pathetic…

‘I Told You So!’. These are not words that listeners usually enjoy hearing. In fact, if you’re looking for a…

Australia’s hopes rest in its youth, or so people used to say in the expectation that rising generations would build…

When Theresa May went off to Switzerland on a walking holiday last August, she said it was the ‘peace and…

Wrexham, North Wales   To window cleaner Andrew Atkinson, Theresa May’s ‘blue-collar Conservatism’ is not just a slogan. It’s what…

The NHS as we know it is dying. It’s no longer a matter of if it will collapse, but when.…

Once, politicians remained in their safe spaces and elections were fought in a handful of swing seats. This time Theresa…

Spas are supposed to be relaxing. You pad around in a regulation robe and too-big slippers. Everything is beautifully soft,…

I was invited to Moscow earlier this year to give a talk about my latest book. But while I was…

Never has the Conservative party been more confident about winning a general election. Theresa May’s popularity ratings have broken all…

On the heels of the Today programme’s invitation to discuss ‘cultural appropriation’ (again), the New York Times reported the disheartening…

From ‘The New Reform Bill’, The Spectator, 19 May 1917: Though we used to be opposed to the suffrage for women,…

Donald Trump has often wrong-footed the media. In last year’s election his campaign seemed to be always on the verge…

Libyan solution Sir: Boris Johnson correctly reports glimmers of hope in Libya, but to say its problems can be solved…

Veggie skills Forest Green Rovers, described as the world’s first vegan football club, was promoted to the Football League. Some…

NHS and computers across the world crippled by ransomware virus

When the centre disappears, equality vanishes with it

Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin…

In his new book Move Fast and Break Things, the American academic Jonathan Taplin makes a decent case that, democratically…

Though I don’t think much of Theresa May’s paternalistic soft-left politics, I do like her no-nonsense style. That Q&A she…

Alastair Campbell once famously punched the Guardian’s Michael White in the face. A commendable thing to do, undoubtedly, as Mr…

‘Exclusive invitation: I want to hear from you, Charles’, it said in my inbox. Theresa May wanted me to take…

Cuba’s gorgeous, crumbling capital has always been a testing ground for writers. That heady combination of revolution, cocktails, sex and…

David Hepworth is such a clever writer — not just clever in the things he writes, but in the way…

Of the many books published this year to mark the centenary of the Russian revolution, this is perhaps the most…

Timbuktu. Can any other three syllables evoke such a thrill? For travellers, explorers and historians of Africa, the ancient desert…

I like novelists who don’t try to do everything in their novels, but just to do something well. This is…

Jack Higgins’s writing routine was said to start with dinner at his favourite Italian restaurant in Jersey, followed by writing…

Justice McCardie was anything but a conventional High Court judge. He left school at 15 and was called to the…

This daintily dress-conscious and rewardingly heavyweight novel is set mainly in a half imaginary stately home in Oxfordshire. The story…

Whether it’s Coleridge’s nightingale or Petrarch’s, Ted Hughes’s wren or Shelley’s skylark, Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Max Porter’s crow, literature…

Baroque opera is increasingly popular in Australia, particularly in recent years through the work of Pinchgut Opera. This administratively tiny…

Donald Winnicott once told a colleague that Tolstoy had been perversely wrong to write that happy families were all alike…

We love Amy Schumer. Fact. And we love Goldie Hawn. Fact. But can we love Snatched? Not so much, if…

‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini…

Photography has many genres, even more than painting, and most photographers achieve fame by focusing on one of them. There…

Two extremes of the listening experience were available on Monday on Radio 4. The day began conventionally enough with Start…

What is it about Yorkshire, particularly Leeds, that it has bred or trained such a succession of famous modern sculptors?…

I’ve often thought that a good idea for an authentic TV cop show would be to portray the police as…

When a composer begins an opera, they create a world. You don’t need a full-scale overture: the tear-stained violins that…

Jez Butterworth’s new play The Ferryman is set in Armagh in 1981. Quinn, a former terrorist, has swapped the armed…

His cartoons were semi-serious responses to societal problems, as this extract from Adam Hart-Davis’s new book shows

Long after my own team had been knocked out of this year’s Spring Fours in Stratford-on-Avon (the most prestigious and…

Regular readers will recall my column of 15 April in which I speculated on the future of the eccentric Fidé…

White to play. This is from Euwe-Fischer, New York 1957. How did Euwe capitalise on the threatening position of his…

In Competition No. 2998 you were invited to submit a set of instructions for an everyday device that have been…

Unclued lights are six characters from 45 and its author. Five of these undergo 45 in one way before entry;…

On 18 March 2017 the great ROCK’N’ROLLER (3) Chuck Berry died. Round the perimeter run the titles of four of…

Q. My mother always told me that only boring people are bored. However she never got stuck at a drinks…

‘That sweet enemy, France.’ It takes a poet to summarise centuries of military and diplomatic history. On a prosaic level,…

At a chic dinner party last week, a Trump insider gossiped about an American president having had an affair with…

Chez Frank is a popular local boar-hunters’ bar, tobacconist and general store at a lonely crossroads in the forest. It…

‘It’s like Pin number,’ said my husband, drifting into lucidity. So it is, in a way. The construction under discussion…

The builder boyfriend has dug himself a hole. I don’t mean he’s in trouble with me. I mean he has…

John Stuart Mill is usually credited as the person who first called the Conservatives ‘the stupid party’, but that isn’t…

When you get into a taxi, there’s usually a framed sheet of paper describing what you pay for your trip:…