The return of The Crown on Netflix has brought us an excellent performance of the Iron Lady according to The…

The ten per cent One of the chief complaints of the – now almost forgotten – Occupy Wall Street movement…

I am now halfway into my 14-day internment in the Howard Springs Quarantine Facility, located in the Top End, a…

The Paris agreement is all hot air

Data tells us all we need to know about tackling the virus

Don’t blame Kerr or the Palace - blame Fraser and Whitlam

Our political world hasn’t been so divided for decades

Donald Trump probably did win in a landslide

So many doomsday scenarios to choose from

Soldiers have rights, too

With Cummings gone, which way will the PM turn now?

The death of the surname

How to win at Scrabble

Beijing’s authority is sweeping through Hong Kong

Civil war is breaking out in Ethiopia

Staying in the Union is now riskier than independence

Inside the court of Carrie Symonds

A parishioner in West Yorkshire has been allowed to put an inscription in Chinese on a relative’s gravestone. ‘There is…

It is such a relief that Dominic Cummings has gone. Not for the sake of the country or the government…

The psychodrama in No. 10 is badly timed. The government has used emergency powers to ban meetings, church services and…

Still distant Sir: In James Forsyth’s analysis (‘Boris’s booster shot’, 14 November) he infers that a vaccine, if provided to…

Boris and the butcher’s dog Who first coined the phrase ‘as fit as a butcher’s dog’? It has been traced…

Donald Trump may be a narcissist, but since he is not mentally ill in the technical sense, he is not…

Home Dominic Cummings, the chief adviser to the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, left Downing Street after a week in which…

Ever since I saw him in Pensacola, Florida the other week, Donald J. Trump will not leave me alone. Each…

Tory MPs are already starting to talk about May’s various elections. Boris Johnson’s first post-Covid electoral test will take place…

‘Frost & Lewis’. It sounds like a programme amalgamating two of the most famous TV detectives. The former diplomat, Lord…

Well thank goodness for that, eh? Just as we reached our darkest hour and resigned ourselves to an endless series…

It’s not axiomatic that taxes must rise to pay for the pandemic, if you seriously believe the surge in growth,…

It has been too long coming. While conscientious and decent liberals have tried to explain why, to their horror, millions…

As his biographer, I feel obliged to quote John Updike’s wise sayings — among them the first rule in his…

If the homage wasn’t clear from the title, Tana French makes sure throughout The Searcher, her seventh novel and second…

Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the…

Should the world be faster or slower? This is a question relevant to global economics, politics and culture. But not…

In the dark days of a terrible winter, Elizabeth David began writing her first book, about Mediterranean food. The timing…

Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which…

Greatness. Genius. Can you bottle it? Is there a formula? Inspired by his Radio 4 series Great Lives, Matthew Parris…

The title of this collection of journalism is a problem. Not the Kant’s Little Prussian Head bit, which, though opaque,…

Harold Bloom devoted his life to literature – but he had little feeling for words, says Philip Hensher

1968 was a year of recurring turbulence for the United States, all of it witnessed in American living rooms, courtesy…

Slowly the world of the arts starts to take a timid step forward in plague-torn Australia. Just as alarming new…

The Opera is coming back! Unable to perform for nine months, the company has suffered great financial loss, forcing substantial…

Covid has been many things to the arts — most of them unprintable. A plague, a scourge, a disaster from…

‘I used to be Mr Nasty! That was good! Mr Nasty was easy!’ Jeremy Paxman bellows at Michael Palin on…

Grade: A The strings rear up, there’s a flash of steel from the trumpets, and ten seconds into Respighi’s Feste…

Hillbilly Elegy is an adaptation of the best-selling memoir, published in 2016, by J.D. Vance and it’s quite a story.…

Ronnie’s: Ronnie Scott and His World-Famous Jazz Club was like the TV equivalent of an authorised biography: impressively thorough, often…

Emilia is a period piece about Emilia Bassano who may have been the ‘dark lady’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The writer,…

Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era

Amy Brooke Once you have paid the Danegeld… We seem to have ingrained in us a sense of fair play,…

Lockdown is hurting everyone except the chickens. I have bought them a conservatory because Philippa, a Light Sussex, looks like…

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Sam Loyd, 1857. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by…

The rubber bridge world has lost one of its best and most flamboyant players; David Herman was an emaciated, elegant…

The octet associated with CHERRY STONES (19) is: tinker (1A), tailor (40), soldier (20), sailor (15), rich man (6A), poor…

The unclued lights are of a kind. Across 9 Go in with force, showing initiative (10) 14 Cast is enormous,…

Laikipia As the train pulled into Victoria my wife Claire, back home on the farm in Kenya, revealed that a…

At dawn, starving, I drove to a commercial laboratory in the town centre where five phials of blood were taken…

At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been…

Q. My son has moved his girlfriend into our fairly small house for the second lockdown. I am grateful for…

In Competition No. 3175 you were invited to submit a prequel to a well-known poem. C. Paul Evans’s opening to…

So the Good Lord really wants to fill out his team: how else to interpret the passing in recent months…

Writing in January, I described internet bullet chess, where the players have one minute for all their moves, as ‘popular,…

New York Who was it that first coined the expression ‘It ain’t over until the fat lady sings’? The great…

The council has told me that what I saw was an ‘alleged bonfire’. When I described flames towering into the…

Earlier this week, the Labour party wrote to the government urging it to bring forward legislation so that social media…