The Spectator
20 October 2018 Aus
Divide and rule: how the EU used Ireland to take control of Brexit
Australia
Bill Shorten, drunken sailor
When Bill Shorten tried to make Question Time hay of Malcolm Turnbull’s political demise, to gales of backbench laughter Prime…
Australian Columnists
Latham’s law
One of the weaknesses in the Australian education system is a lack of understanding of civics. Teaching children the basics…
Brown study
Alan Jones was wrong to apologise for his interview as part of the Sydney Opera House fracas. Once you apologise…
Australian Features
Boot Brisbane, kick Canberra
‘I am delighted to be speaking in Cairns, capital of the new State of North Queensland,’ I told the new…
Grievance studies gone to the dogs
If it wasn’t so serious the recent example of peer-reviewed journals being duped would be laughable. Confirming Orwell’s observation that…
The Facebook page of Dorian Gray
Technology is disruptive. It destroys and creates. It also defines us as human beings. No technology, though, even television, has…
Free speech exclusion zone
The recent new abortion clinic exclusion zone laws in NSW specify that it is illegal to obstruct and harass people…
Business/Robbery etc
Whatever the outcome of Saturday’s green-tainted global-warming-fixated Wentworth by-election, it won’t knock King Coal off his economy-boosting throne. And there…
Media mafia and mob rule
Most right-thinking people, of all political persuasions and of none, will have breathed a sigh of relief when they heard…
Lunch with Leo and Sir Francis
I was having a chat with renowned Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and brilliant British empiricist and champion of the scientific…
Features
Divide and rule: how the EU used Ireland to take control of Brexit
The story of Britain and Ireland’s relationship has, all too often, been one of mutual incomprehension: 1066 and All That…
Why French kids don’t get fat – and British ones do
A decade ago a book called French Women Don’t Get Fat took the Anglophone world by storm. It was a…
How Bellingcat outfoxes the world’s spy agencies
Bellingcat is an independent group of exceptionally gifted Leicester-based internet researchers who use information gleaned from open sources to dig…
Getting the sack was a shock but not a surprise
It was a shock but not really a surprise. I came back from holiday at the beginning of August to…
Are you a politically correct pervert?
It hasn’t always been easy being a progressive-minded man who prides himself on his sensitivity to issues of race, gender,…
Happy Birthday, Blue Peter
Every Monday and Thursday afternoon when I was growing up, a drum roll would sound throughout suburban Britain. ‘Damian? Blue…
Durban Notebook: a nation in paralysis
No one likes uncertainty and in Britain we’ve got more than our fair share. But spare a thought for South…
Notes on Davenports Magic Shop, an emporium for serious conjurors
It’s a very fitting place for a magic shop. Hidden away in the maze of pedestrian tunnels that lead from…
The Week
Modern family: how Meghan and Harry helped firm up the monarchy
Whether it was intended so or not, the decision by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex to choose Australia as…
Portrait of the week: Crisis talks and pizza in Andrea Leadsom’s office
Home Brexit was in crisis as the European Council (of heads of state or government) met. Theresa May, the Prime…
Ignore the global warming hysteria: hurricanes are not getting worse
When I land on the east coast of America, people tell me they’ve never met a Trump voter. When I…
Mazes; royal babies; carbon data; FTSE falls
Twists and turns Jeremy Hunt, taking a group of EU foreign ministers around the maze at Chevening House in Kent,…
The Romans liked a stylish death
World Mental Health day raised again the issue of suicide, still regarded as happening only among those ‘whose balance of…
Letters: the Irish and Brexit; the Archbishop’s witness; meat not wheat
Ireland’s day of reckoning Sir: John Waters is more right than he knows when he talks about the Irish attitude…
Columnists
The civil service’s anti-Brexit bias
Can you think of a serious crime which does not involve hate or, at the very least, contempt? You must…
Melania Trump elegantly rises above the media muck
I am not sure that Melania Trump had the introduction of Henry IV Part 2 in mind when she sat…
Hell hath no fury like an irate teenage girl
Something troubling is happening to our girls. I noticed it again most recently at this year’s Battle of Ideas —…
Good news – now everyone can be a victim
We are terribly remiss in our coverage of women’s sport in The Spectator, so I thought I would try to…
Why I’m boycotting ‘Davos in the Desert’
The current stock-market correction has been steaming down the track since August and I claim no wisdom for having predicted…
Books
Whatever America is searching for, Trump isn’t providing it
Donald J. Trump has sparked some soul- searching among US historians: has this happened before? Does it mean America has…
150 years on, what makes Little Women such an enduring classic?
The great thing about Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women is that it has something for everyone: stay-at-home types have…
Manic creations: Lost Empress: A Protest, by Sergio De La Pava, reviewed
American mass-incarceration is the most overt object of the ‘protest’ of this novel’s subtitle. The author, Sergio De La Pava,…
Gatsby in Japan: Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami, reviewed
Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed…
Kidnapped by Kett: Tombland, by C.J. Sansom, reviewed
Tombland is not to be treated lightly. Its length hints at its ambitions. Here is a Tudor epic disguised as…
How on earth did North Vietnam prevail against the world’s greatest power?
The 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war has produced an outpouring of books, along with Ken Burns’s 18-hour television spectacular,…
Josef Albers: the Bauhaus artist whose pupil designed Auschwitz
The German-born artist, Josef Albers, was a contrary so-and-so. Late in life, he was asked why — in the early…
Were the Highland Clearances really a byword for infamy?
There is a degree of irony in the opening chapter of T.M. Devine’s history, lambasting popular previous depictions of the…
Arts
Strawberry Hill revived
We can’t know what Horace Walpole would make of the continuing popularity of serendipity, a word he coined in 1754…
Wonderful, overwhelming, once-in-a-lifetime display of Bruegels – get on a plane now
‘About suffering’, W.H. Auden memorably argued in his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, the old masters ‘were never wrong’. Great…
Bleak, unflinching, oppressive, violent – and magical: Dogman reviewed
Matteo Garrone’s Dogman, which is Italy’s entry for the foreign language Oscar next year, is bleak, unflinching, oppressive, masculine (very),…
Women should boycott David Hare’s slanderous new play: I’m Not Running reviewed
Sir David Hare’s weird new play sets out to chronicle the history of the Labour movement from 1996 to the…
When haddocks flirt, they sound like a motorbike revving up
Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding…
Women’s toplessness caused less offence to Victorians than their trousers
‘They did not look like women, or at least a stranger new to the district might easily have been misled…
An enjoyably gossipy whisk through half a century of fierce rivalries and bruised egos
At the beginning of Barneys, Books and Bust Ups: 50 Years of the Booker Prize (BBC4), Kirsty Wark’s voiceover promised…
Lautrec often made the stars in his posters look appalling – but they kept coming back
You don’t need to be much of a psychologist to understand the trajectory of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Born to aristocratic…
Thrilling, heartbreaking music drama – you need to see it: ENO’s Porgy and Bess reviewed
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess springs to life fully formed, and pulls you in before a word has been sung. A…
The truth about Wilhelm Furtwängler
The morning after the first night of Ronald Harwood’s Taking Sides in May 1995, I received a call from Otto…
Laudably perverse – maybe album of the year: Cypress Hill’s Elephants on Acid reviewed
Grade: A+ Easily album title of the year, maybe album of the year. A true bravura offering from these supposedly…
‘I should just shut up’: Dominic West on #MeToo and the perils of talking politics
Lounging confidently on the sofa of a Soho hotel suite, Dominic West has been beaming at me, but now his…
Mitchell Galleries
One of the loveliest and best-loved buildings in Sydney, the Mitchell Building of the State Library of NSW is enjoying…
Life
Why truth gets you nowhere
New York There is fear and loathing in this city, with men looking over their shoulders for the thought…
Guns and gin: just another Spectator Wine Club lunch
East of London the Thames broadens dramatically to a surreal waste of mud and sewage-coloured water lined with shipping-container dumps.…
Silicon Valley’s evil plan
After months of trying not to try the exciting new version of Gmail, the exciting new version of Gmail tried…
no. 528
White to play. This position is from Khmelniker-Harari, Isle of Man 2017. How did White make the most of his…
Mary, Mary…
In Competition No. 3070 you were invited to provide a poem with the title ‘When I Grow Up I Want…
2381: Step changes
1 Across and 45 Across form a phrase, and the other unclued entries form a word ladder linking them, by…
to 2378: Boundary
LIMES (22), a term for a boundary of the ROMAN EMPIRE (7 30), is a DEFINITION (19) of five items…
Why are faceless accusations allowed to end men’s careers?
On 11 October 2017 an anonymous Google spreadsheet began doing the rounds of American newspapers and magazines — a document…
The terrible injury toll of modern rugby
Eddie Jones’s sorrows as England’s rugby coach certainly keep coming in big battalions. Now the giant battered No 8 Billy…
Dear Mary: My friend’s cooked breakfasts make me gag
Q. My fiancé and I spend many great weekends with another couple. I am a vegetarian and quite particular about…
Breakfast for idiots: it was the wrong time of day for a visit to Gazelle Mayfair
I couldn’t find Gazelle. I walked up and down Albermarle Street, in which Oscar Wilde once plotted his own doom…
Mind your language: Woman, women, womxn
When I say that it has given comfort to my husband, you can judge how foolish the Wellcome Institute was…
