The Spectator
23 April 2022 Aus
Luvvies guide to defining a woman
Trans rights do not trump women’s identity and safety
Australia
Supporting Ms Deves
At this election, Australians not only get to decide who governs the nation – Liberals or Labor –but they could…
Australian Columnists
Libs have lost the plot on transgender
There’s something in the water in Warringah. At the last election, when Tony Abbott lost to Zali Steggall, and now…
Australian notes
As I was driving home on Saturday after a busy day, I realised that everything I had done that day,…
Australian Features
What does China know about MH370?
There are still too many loose ends to the tragic tale of the missing Malaysian aircraft
Luvvies guide to defining a woman
Trans rights do not trump women’s identity and safety
Features
Hitchhiking
When I first saw Vitaly I thought he was drunk. I was standing outside a petrol station near Fulda, in…
The Week
Portrait of the week
Home Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told the House of Commons that it did not occur to him that the…
The long haul
The first few weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine went so badly that it was tempting to see the withdrawal…
Morale support
Commentators talk much about the morale of the Ukrainian troops and the edge that this has given them over the…
Columnists
Memo to Elon Musk: Tesla matters more for civilisation than Twitter
I spent Easter agonising over whether to throw the considerable weight of this column behind Elon Musk’s maverick $43 billion…
Reasons not to be cheerful
Mid-term unpopularity is a given in British politics. Veterans from the Thatcher era like to joke that a government that…
My phone call with God
Got slightly wrecked over the bank holiday weekend and had hoped to kind of glide through the early part of…
The Spectator’s Notes
My friend, the novelist Alan Judd, emails with the right quotation for those who argue that Putin should be given…
Being reasonable isn’t easy
Some years ago there was a study at Harvard that tried to find out what people did when they held…
The rise of the wimps
I was extra pleased to have swerved the modern curse that is Wordle when I read that ‘sensitive’ words have…
Books
The money behind the Third Reich
It was a clear cold morning in January 1936 when Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler arrived at the luxurious Regina Palast Hotel…
Thereby hangs a tale
The case of the retired major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, a Hay-on-Wye solicitor hanged in 1922 for killing his wife Katharine…
Be a self-sacrificing ant
One day the writer and artist James Bridle rented a hatchback, taped a smartphone to the steering wheel and installed…
Damned either way
The War on the West is Douglas Murray’s latest blast against loony left wokery, chiefly in the areas of race…
Accentuate the negative
For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronised by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in…
Memory test
On page 231 of The Candy House, a sequel – no, a ‘sibling’ says Jennifer Egan – to the Pulitzer…
The great divide
Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-winning recent film Belfast chronicles the travails of a Protestant family amid sectarian conflict in 1969. Louise Kennedy’s…
Muse and monster
Nancy Cunard’s defiance of convention began early, fuelled by bitter resentment towards her mother, says Jane Ridley
That way madness lies
There is a trend for books in which academics write personally about their engagement with literature. Examples include Lara Feigel’s…
A catalogue of invented tongues
The comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in his stage persona as the dim-witted interviewer Ali G, once asked Noam Chomsky if…
Arts
A peculiar backwards mutation
It’s not hard to sympathise with Christopher Allen’s recent column in the Review section of the Australian decrying the juxtaposition…
Trumpian lullaby
Trump is said to be a gift for bad satirists and a problem for good ones. He dominates Mike Bartlett’s…
Don’t frighten the horses
Chivalry – written by and starring Sarah Solemani and Steve Coogan – is a comedy drama about post-#MeToo Hollywood life.…
Thrills, frills and folderols
A clever, original exhibition at the Wallace Collection has Laura Freeman twirling her way through the West End
Pot head
Richard Batterham died last September at the age of 85. He had worked in his pottery in the village of…
Rebel yell
Ordinarily, if a podcast purports to be revelatory, you can assume it is anything but. There’s a glut of programmes…
Father John Misty: Chloë and the Next Twentieth Century
Grade: A– In which Josh Tillman reimagines the whole back catalogue of 20th-century American pop music (except for rock), tilting…
You’re Nicked
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent stars Nicolas Cage playing a version of Nicolas Cage, in a parody of Nicolas…
Life
Aussie life
Of the 101 Australian military personnel who have been awarded the Victoria Cross, our highest honour for bravery, most lie…
Language
Here it is! I have finally found one word that will describe the Liberal party in its present state— ‘agathokakological’.…
What is possible
There are lessons in chess that cannot be learned from a book. One lands, from time to time, in a…
Solution to 2549: Obscurity
PALE FIRE is a novel by Vladimir NABOKOV (18). Synonyms of words in the novel’s title are 7, 15A, and…
Chess puzzle
Black to play. Sukandar-Niemann, Reykjavik Open 2022. In this preposterous position, Black found a quick forced mate. What did he…
French connection
In Competition No. 3245, you were asked to take a passage from a classic of French literature and recast it…
We love you Rangers, we do
Normal families spend the Easter holidays by the seaside or in the Mediterranean. But not the Youngs. My three boys…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. Financially successful friends have kindly invited my husband and me to stay for a week in France. Our problem…
Salmagundi
‘It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words.…
Into the labyrinth
I am never bored with Harrods, only disgusted, and it is disgust of the most animated and exciting kind. It…
What English cricket needs now
You couldn’t ask for a more amiable man than Rob Key to run English cricket: affable, shrewd and universally liked,…









































































