A Dyson cleaner is a slick, state-of-the-art invention, looking like an escapee from the set of Alien with its transparent…

With the stuff and nonsense being thrown around about Dyson Heydon and the Royal Commission into union corruption, it is…

There are few things better than a week off work, flying to the far side of the world to watch…

The ABC has allowed Radio National to be used by fanatics pushing a virulently anti-Israel agenda

The behaviour and attitudes of today’s anti-racists bears an uncanny resemblance to, er, racism

Those who clearly know better are appalled by the idea that Tony Abbott wants the people to decide on gay marriage

The Kurds are getting a raw deal from Australia

Labor’s Special Theory of Relativity

Turkmenistan boasts the lowest smoking rates in the world. How on earth do they do it?

The trendy nutritional advice that's more likely to make you ill than healthy

Women tend to see themselves as less attractive than they are. Men seem to have the opposite problem

His opponents say that his campaign is just an extension of his reality TV career, but The Donald has a real ground game

The far left can’t win without the aid of callous, complacent conservatism

Underperforming British Caribbean schoolchildren could learn a lot from their African immigrant peers

Reform for the second chamber must come from within

A lost short story by John Steinbeck, illustrated by Steph von Reiswitz

Caribbean encounters with beautiful Georgian architecture and the legacy of slavery

Over the past week, the government has finally made a decisive move to kickstart a fracking industry in Britain. Licences…

Home Andrew Burnham described calls from Yvette Cooper, a rival candidate for the Labour leadership, for him to withdraw from…

Plus: finding the spirit of Scotland in a small northern Spanish city

Plus: The EU's worst spending; unlikely hit events; rising and falling names

Gossip, true or not, drives human behaviour. That makes it part of history

From ‘Education and the War’, The Spectator, 21 August 1915: War is a time in which a shortage of labourers can…

Justified bombing Sir: A.N Wilson’s suggestion that the 1945 nuclear bombing of Japan was “without any military or moral justification”…

If Jeremy Corbyn wins, expect much pondering of Tony Benn’s last question: ‘How do I get rid of you?’

The question of looks; Corbyn’s position on the EU; Mr Chips and Pearl Harbor; what this year’s A-level results tell us

Tom Fletcher’s love letter to Lebanon offers hope for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s lost literary form

Almost half of young people now identify as neither gay nor straight, although very few use the term ‘bisexual’. I think this is what progress looks like

Andrew Ritchie is overdue a place in the Lords. Plus: executive pay and graduate jobs

But in The Universe in Your Hand, Christophe Galfard takes the reader by the hand to explain quarks, gluons, parallel universes and exploding suns in a friendly, avuncular-vicar manner

China’s economic miracle is deceptive: the country is still traumatised by the effects of the Cultural Revolution, according to Andrew G. Walder’s thought-provoking China Under Mao

Tales of the desperate and surreal include hungry comic-book characters who resort to eating their own speech bubbles

If only Peter Doggett’s vast survey had been a little less scholarly, we might all have been talking about Electric Shock — rather than just trying to lift it

In this wry reading diary, James revisits the books he has most loved — for poetry, history and swashbuckling adventure

In Circling the Square, the foreign correspondent Wendell Steavenson traces — through lightening character-sketches of Cairo life — how the Egyptian revolution ‘see-sawed between joy and death’

Among Robert Roper’s many surprising and original ideas in his account of Nabokov in America is that the novelist’s son Dmitri may have been the inspiration for Lolita

Reading Tony Little’s An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Education — full of insight, erudition, sympathy and common sense — is a valuable education in itself

Leighton Pugh’s extraordinary feat is to read aloud the entire Diary — all 116 hours of it — and bring 17th-century London magnificently to life

The visionary theatremaker’s return to Edinburgh after 20 years, with the autobiographical 887, marks a return to form

‘The greatest pianist you’ve never heard of’ seems fair: he may well be one of the greatest I’ve ever heard

The Pallant House Gallery’s excellent new show reveals Sickert in all his glory and contradiction

Reviews of The Coin-Operated Girl; The Man Called Monkhouse; John Lennon: In His Own Write; and When Blair had Bush and Bunga

While a first-rate performance of The Rake’s Progress can’t disguise the fact that it’s just an ingenious toy, a misconceived Figaro remains unsinkable

I wished everyone had taken arsenic early on so that we could all go home

The Scandalous Lady W, a relentlessly 21st-century version of a great period scandal, spells out the social implications with a giant trowel

Plus: in Scandanavia there’s nothing posh about summerhouses

His attitude to the Chinese authorities may be admirable — but his work isn’t up to much

Last week’s opening by the Sydney Theatre Company of The Present was a high water mark in its history. Adapted…

In an outdoor restaurant in Kolanaki nostalgia swelled to tsunami levels as I reminisced about the Athens I knew and loved

‘How many lovers have you had?’ asked my lover. How do you answer that?

If anyone wants to know why Labour is about to elect Corbyn, they should come and sit in my back garden

As for me, I am not counting my chickens before they hatch: well, yes I am – and my ducks too

Most of the information you need is publically available

I have great respect for top French bridge players but I think it’s fair to say they don’t go in…

The Australian grandmaster David Smerdon has written a truly exciting book about some of the byways in the Centre Counter…

Black to play. This position is from Kosmo-Smerdon, Goa 2002. Can you spot Black’s beautiful winning move? Answers to me…

In Competition No. 2911 you were invited to submit a thriller in three text messages. This one seemed straightforward enough…

Four unclued lights (two of which consist of two words each) belong in the same category; one unclued light defines…

TOO-TOO is a HOMOPHONE (38) of TUTU (defined by 1A and 8, and the surname of 17, the former 11…

The staff are great, and so is the water park. The wine, on the other hand, is shocking

The England captain has proved that good guys can come first. It was telling that he gave two stumps to his young stars

Plus: Tips for ordering station taxis; and how to get 90 euros back from a fellow holiday guest

There are 41 branches now. The Piccadilly one is a very strange place

It was a favourite word in parts of the once-influential eugenics movement