The Spectator
Australia
Woke warlords
For commonsense conservative Australians living in New South Wales, the anger is palpable. Yet again, the woke factional warriors of…
Australian Features
Multiculturalism – a good idea at the time?
Yet Labor keeps bringing in more people from dangerous places
Features
Keep fun out of funerals
There are two untraditional ways to take your leave of this world in Britain. The bleaker is the ‘direct cremation’…
The myth of Britain’s fleeing non-doms
According to popular imagination, the skies over Britain have been full these past few months of fleets of private jets…
An American’s love letter to Britain
My wife and I relocated to the UK a few months ago after spending the past 37 years in the…
The dark truth about Hollywood assistants
Anew stop has been added to the map of Movie Star Homes and Crime Scenes, on sale at LAX airport:…
Can Kamala Harris bluff her way to the White House?
Chicago ‘There are no disasters,’ said Boris Johnson, who was born in America. ‘Only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh…
The depraved world of chess cheats
Amina Abakarova, a 40-year-old chess player from Russia, supposedly tried to poison a younger rival at the Dagestan Chess Championship…
A connoisseur’s guide to collecting matchboxes
We’d been told it would be a ‘brat’ summer, characterised by its inventor, the singer Charli XCX, as ‘a pack…
Is the CCRC fit to decide on Lucy Letby’s appeal?
Whatever happened to the likes of the BBC’s Rough Justice and Channel 4’s Trial and Error? Why did human rights…
The Week
Trump misses Biden
Chicago Everyone in the Democrats’ Convention centre – a bleakly corporate sports stadium on the edge of Chicago – is…
Portrait of the week: prisoners are freed, Ted Baker closes and train drivers announce strikes
Home Emergency measures, known as Operation Early Dawn, were brought in to ease prison overcrowding. Defendants would be summoned to…
Labour’s union problem
Less than two months in, one aspect of Keir Starmer’s government is becoming clear. This administration is closer to the…
Letters: we have let down white, working-class boys
The lost boys Sir: The only statement in your powerful leading article (‘Boy trouble’, 17 August) which can be challenged…
Should Labour be messing with the school curriculum?
Labour’s new education secretary wishes, as usual, to change everything. She might consider the advice of the Roman educationist Quintilian…
Columnists
The tragic misfortune of Mike Lynch
Twice I met the tech tycoon Mike Lynch (missing, feared dead, as we went to press), once a decade or…
Shattering the myth of the ‘glass ceiling’
What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In…
Should radical lesbians dictate what we eat?
Are radical lesbians dictating what we can and cannot eat, through the offices of this very magazine? It would certainly…
Farage’s next move in his plan to destroy the Tories
On Tuesday afternoon, a familiar figure pulled up at a Westminster café to plot the Tories’ downfall. Nigel Farage beamed…
Who will stand up for France’s aristocrats?
When it was recently announced that 40,000 people, the great majority civilians, have been killed in the Gaza conflict, I…
Can you spot an ‘extreme misogynist’?
Can you tell the difference between an extreme misogynist and a moderate misogynist? Hating women has always seemed, to me…
Books
The song of the bearded seal and other marvels
Amorina Kingdon explores the extraordinary range of sounds beneath the sea, from the fluting calls of the larger mammals to the hums and moans of fish
A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed
In the build-up to the Great War another drama unfolds, as the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith is seen to be distracted from politics by his infatuation with the beautiful Venetia Stanley
More curious canine incidents: Dogs and Monsters, by Mark Haddon, reviewed
Mesmerising accounts of dogs feature in these latest stories, including Actaeon’s tragic hounds, St Antony’s comforting mutt and Laika, the husky hurled into space
A choice of thrillers for end of summer escapism
Charlotte Philby’s appropriately titled The End of Summer skilfully explores the strains of a double life. Also reviewed: Ajay Close, Charlotte Vassell and Giuseppe Miale di Mauro
How weird was Oliver Cromwell?
The pious people’s champion was not only a sadist and ruthless self-promoter; he could also indulge in infantile horseplay during the pressurised period leading up to the regicide
Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?
Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English
Two young men in flight: Partita and A Winter in Zürau, by Gabriel Josipovici reviewed
Kafka, spitting blood, escapes Prague to join his sister in Bohemia, and a fictional lover flees the wrath of an outraged husband in Josipovici’s delightful two-in-one trick
Iris Apfel’s talent to amaze
Instantly recognisable with her cascades of necklaces and startling colours (‘pastels make me nervous’), the interior decorator would achieve real fame with a Met exhibition in 2005
Celebrating Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet
The writing system the Native American devised for his people was soon followed by a printing press, a newspaper and a far higher literacy rate than that of their oppressors
Introducing Tchaikovsky the merry scamp
Rescuing the composer from his tortured image, Simon Morrison presents him as a sort of Till Eulenspiegel character, laughing and pranking his way through life
Arts
A man of incomparable beauty
It was sad to see that great French actor Alain Delon had died the other day. He was a man…
A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed
In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know:…
Britain’s youngest summer opera festival is seriously impressive
Waterperry is one of the UK’s youngest summer opera festivals: it started up in 2018, at the northern limit of…
How did we ever come to accept the inhumane excesses of capitalism?
What was neoliberalism? In its most recent iteration, we think of the market seeping into every minute corner of human…
The best film you won’t go and see this week: Widow Clicquot reviewed
August is known as ‘dump month’. It’s when the most forgettable films are released on the grounds that people don’t…
The cast mistake screaming for comedy: Cockfosters, at Turbine Theatre, reviewed
The Turbine Theatre is a newish venue beneath the railway arches of Grosvenor Bridge in Battersea. The comfy auditorium is…
Too bombastic to be country music: Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion reviewed
Grade: B Country music has become the acceptable route through which American pop stars resuscitate their floundering careers: sales are…
Why are these dead-eyed K-pop groups represented as some kind of ideal?
On Saturday, Made in Korea: The K-pop Experience began by hailing K-pop as ‘the multi-billion-pound music that’s taken the world…
Triumphant: Big Thief, at Green Man, reviewed
One of the first things I learned after seeing Big Thief triumph at Green Man is that some long-time fans…
Life
Language
Kamala Harris keeps telling us she wants ‘equity’ not ‘equality.’ What does she mean? She is using ‘equality’ to means…
What’s the right way to voyage?
My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday.…
I was wrong about staycations
I hadn’t intended to go on a ‘staycation’ this summer. Quite the contrary, I’d booked a family holiday to Norway.…
Dear Mary: how do I hide my pregnancy from my boozy friends?
Q. We love having friends to stay at our house in Cornwall. One particular guest has the habit of arriving…
The simple beauty of the Hundred
Time to come clean: I really like the Hundred. This is the sort of view that normally makes people look…
A slice of Paris in Crouch End: Bistro Aix reviewed
There is a wonderful cognitive dissonance to Bistro Aix. It thinks it is in Paris but it is really in…
2668: Obit VII
Clockwise round the grid from the square between 3 and 4 run the names (forename and surname) of four eminent…
The fun of the Shergar Cup
Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at…
Why can no one find the eye hospital?
‘Where’s the eye hospital?’ shouted pretty much everyone standing outside a building signposted eye hospital in Irish. ‘An tAonad Oftailmeolaiochta’…
My Egyptian mau pyramid scheme
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna Was it chance or destiny, I wonder, that caused the eldest of our six children, Caterina, to…
American salads are weird – but an egg salad is perfect
The Americans are weird about salad. I’m sorry, but somebody had to say it. Really, their use of the word…
Spectator Competition: August society
In Competition 3363 you were invited to write a poem about holidaymakers from a local’s perspective. Thanks to Paul Freeman…
Hans Niemann against the World
For the irrepressible Hans Niemann, August is no time to chill. The 21-year-old American grandmaster began the month by defeating his…
