The Spectator
Australia
Watchdog consumers
The news that Brad Banducci is stepping down as CEO of supermarket giant Woolworths is to be warmly welcomed. This…
Australian Features
China’s economic handicap
The Communist party’s self-interest blocks needed fixes
Jury’s verdict against republic referendum
Ironic that thanks are due to Anthony Albanese
Features
The tragedy of Blackpool
It’s mid-afternoon in the Royal Oak pub in Blackpool and Liv has arrived to sell a bag full of stuff…
Why Britain stopped working
What sent the economy into recession at the end of last year? The government blames higher interest rates, ushered in…
Putin’s British prisoner: Vladimir Kara-Murza is languishing in a Siberian jail
Opposing Vladimir Putin is a lethal business. The world was reminded of this last week after the sudden death of…
The fight to save an ancient City synagogue from developers
There was a little number, 223, pasted onto the back of one of the centuries-old wooden seats in Bevis Marks…
The Week
Columnists
Books
The complexities of our colonial legacy
Weighing the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ effects of British imperialism is a futile exercise, says Sathnam Sanghera. But he comes perilously close to doing just that
Sisterly duty: The Painter’s Daughters, by Emily Howes, reviewed
In a celebrated portrait of his daughters, Thomas Gainsborough shows the older child protecting her sister from harm. The roles would be dramatically reversed in later life
Wishful thinking: Leaving, by Roxana Robinson, reviewed
Two former college sweethearts meet by chance in their sixties and fall in love again. But the trouble it causes makes a happy ending impossible
The English were never an overtly religious lot
Undeterred, Peter Ackroyd takes us on a breezy tour of the nation’s religious history, from the Venerable Bede to the present
Will Keir Starmer ever learn to loosen up?
The Labour leader comes across as compassionate and hard-working, but so ill at ease in front of the cameras that even his close friends fail to recognise him
There was nothing remotely pleasant about a peasant’s existence
Focusing on Ireland and his own peasant heritage, Patrick Joyce laments the passing of a distinctive way of life. But the world his parents left behind was truly horrible
Arts
An all-but-lost treasure
Tennessee Williams is still looking like one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century and the plays he wrote…
Will a new Labour government let architects reshape housing?
‘We make our buildings, and afterwards they make us,’ Winston Churchill said in 1924 in a speech to the Architectural…
Life
Aussie life
Surprisingly, perhaps, it was only 20 years after the Union flag was first raised in Sydney Cove that white Australians…
Language
Is the great old Aussie word ‘bloke’ an offensive word? The army thinks it is. Writing in the Daily Telegraph…
