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The Spectator

24 July 2021 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Free speech dies in quarantine

Last week the British provocateuse Katie Hopkins was deported from Australia to Britain, an ironical inversion of our colonial history…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

Here at The Spectator Australia, we work tirelessly to keep you up to date on developments concerning the great institutions…

Australian Notes

Australian notes

Special Drawing Rights: one step closer to world government Even among this journal’s well-informed readers, how many have heard of,…

Australian Features

Features Australia, New Zealand

New Zealanders are revolting against Ardern

Hard-left policies built on race are turning Kiwis off

Features Australia

Flirting with the Marxists

On Big Tech, the Democrats & censoring political opponents

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

Perceived judicial bias and untrustworthy environment law

Features Australia

The moral scolds are now in charge

The world of ‘Bridgerton’ is an apt metaphor

Features Australia

The Big Lie vs Stop the Steal

Election integrity is the real battle

Features Australia

Ivermectin. It’s as Aussie as Vegemite

The path out of the pandemic is under our noses

Features

Notes on...

Gosforth Cross

In the small Cumbrian village of Gosforth, in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, there is a sandstone cross which…

Features

The jab age

Party time depends on following the party line

Features

Now what?

The government’s Covid optimism is fading fast

Features

Fuelling the fire

Lebanon is trapped in a nightmare of its own making

Features

Losing the plot

Real gardens are dying out

Features

Cricket notebook

Although it was a miracle that he survived until a few weeks before his 95th birthday, the death of John…

Features

Dishing the dirt

The case against organic food

Features

Game changer

The uncomfortable truth about the Nazis and the Olympics

The Week

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home On the eve of the day that most coronavirus restrictions were to be lifted, the Prime Minister and Chancellor…

Letters

Letters

Out of Afghanistan Sir: Boyd Tonkin’s review of Anna Aslanyan’s Dancing on Ropes highlights the post-war abandonment of local Afghan…

Barometer

Barometer

Waiting Games What did Japan, and the world, look like the last time Tokyo held the Olympics in 1964? —…

Diary

Diary

You always remember when a prime minister calls you to ask you to take on a new role, and you…

Leading article

On the cards

Back when Boris Johnson was on a mission to stop identity cards being used in Britain, he made a very…

Ancient and modern

No time for losers

Every red-blooded Englishman has believed that exercise in the open air is the finest prophylactic against popery, adultery and the…

Columnists

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

Anyone who thinks Boris Johnson lacks statecraft should pay attention to Dominic Cummings’s attacks on him. They often to seem…

Columns

World gone lazy

‘Where’s the car?’ said my wife Alice, interrupting my Zoom meeting on Saturday morning. ‘It’s where you left it,’ I…

Any other business

The clever radical who led the City’s transformation

It’s a vivid example of unintended consequences that the swimming-pool builders of southern England should owe so much to Sir…

Columns

Will England pull out of the World Cup?

I wonder if the moral guardians of our country — the England football team — intend to participate in the…

Columns

The tax-and-spend Tories

When you ask a government minister why something hasn’t happened, you get a one-word answer: ‘Covid’. It has become the…

Columns

Get ready for the Boring Twenties

Earlier this year, I noted the suggestion (made by an American academic and run with by a swathe of the…

Books

More from Books

Sacred and dammed

It’s one of the most tantalising travel images in the world — a felucca floating along the Nile at sunset,…

More from Books

A sly old fox

Rumours reach me that the libel report for Stephen Bayley’s forthcoming biography of Terence Conran was longer than the book…

Lead book review

A dangerous madness

The QAnon conspiracy theory may be absurd, but it can’t be ignored. It has already led to significant acts of violence, says Damian Thompson

More from Books

No clowning around

What’s so serious about a red nose? How should we analyse the ‘specific socio-historical relations’ and ‘aesthetic trends particular to…

More from Books

Bitter pills to swallow

What is it like to go mad? Not so much developing depression or having a panic attack — which is…

More from Books

The thunderclap moment

For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…

More from Books

A man with a plan for Manhattan

What makes a city? The collective labour of millions packed into its history; the constant forgetting of incomers who arrive…

More from Books

Three brides for three brothers

Sunjeev Sahota’s novels present an unvarnished image of British Asian lives. Ours Are the Streets chronicles a suicide bomber’s radicalisation,…

More from Books

The best times you’ll never remember

It was once a favourite theory of optimistic drunkards that a suitably ‘moderate’ level of alcohol consumption provided covert health…

More from Books

Star signs

In 2002 I was living in Berlin. One day my upstairs neighbour Peter told me he had just returned from…

More from Books

A disaster waiting to happen

Mountains are humanity’s most comforting topographical feature. Wherever you find them you will also find those who have flocked to…

Arts

Australian Arts

The Greeks

What a time of captivity, what a time of plague. The Disney musical Frozen, long delayed by the mammoth Melbourne…

Arts feature

Money, money – and music

Art is supposed to emerge from poverty but extreme wealth does not preclude talent, as the history of composers proves. By Richard Bratby

Cinema

Bring on the tissues

Not one, but two British films this week, one that’s only being screened at the cinema (if you’re brave enough)…

Theatre

Escapist comedy at its very best

Lady Sylvia is a gorgeous aristocrat whose hand is sought by the charming Dorante whom she has never met. To…

Pop

Could she be the new Sade?

Some years ago, when I was the music editor of a newspaper, I called a number of historians of black…

Radio

It’s who you know

All the world’s on stage again so where to go to for insight into what to see and why? Podcasts,…

Television

The totalitarian handbook

How to Become a Tyrant(Netflix) is ideal history TV for Generation No Attention Span. Presented in six bite-sized chunks by…

Opera

Too bawdy for the Beeb

Malcolm Arnold composed his opera The Dancing Master in 1952 for BBC television. It never appeared, the problem being the…

Exhibitions

Grandeur and subtlety

The Victorian dictum ‘every picture tells a story’ is true of Paula Rego’s works, but it’s only part of the…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life

It used to be that sporting endeavour was regarded as a noble cause, and that our sporting pastimes were governed…

Aussie Life

Aussie Language

Talking to Peta Credlin on Sky News I coined a new expression, ‘language communists’. I used to call the bullies…

Food

Damascene moment

Imad’s Syrian Kitchen is an eyrie off Carnaby Street, a once-famous road which seems to exist nowadays to sell trainers…

Spectator sport

Can the Lions prise open the strong Boks?

You would need a digger to explore the levels of irony in a Springbok chief slagging off an opponent’s dirty…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. My beloved wife has been studying Chinese metaphysics for 18 months. Our house and garden have been badly neglected…

Mind your language

Leather and prunella

‘Oh, yes,’ said my husband, enthusiastically, ‘a loathsome disease. The tongue goes black and dry.’ He was referring to an…

No sacred cows

Knee-jerk reactions

Before the television presenter Guto Harri took the knee live on air — which cost him his job at GB…

Bridge

Bridge

Bridge is a game you can never fully master, which is why it’s so endlessly stimulating. No sooner have you…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle No. 663

White to play. A variation from Grandelius – Xiong, Fide World Cup, Sochi 2021. With an accurate queen check,White can…

Crossword

2516: Such childish vocabulary

The nouns from the first sentence of a book (in the ODQ) appear as unclued lights — apart from two.…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2513: Golden anniversary

The announcement reads: ‘Fifty years ago, on July the third, Jac’s first crossword in this series was published.’ The shaded…

Chess

Kasparov’s tailspin

In a game between top players, the opening moves signify not only the battleground they have embraced, but also the…

Low life

Low life

We arranged to meet the second, more expensive, guide of our Somme battlefield visit at the Thiepval Memorial visitor centre…

The turf

The turf

At least England’s defeat in the European Cup final has spared us the sight of Boris Johnson, who can scent…

High life

High life

Patmos I’m in Patmos with four grandchildren, two children, and a wife. I know, I know, it sounds very lower–middle-class…

Competition

Marriage guidance

In Competition No. 3208, you were invited to submit a recipe for marital bliss on behalf of an author of…

Real life

Real life

The scaffolding pole across the public footpath led to a farcical conversation with the local council. I had been walking…