With luck and prudent decision-making, the Coalition government will ride comfortably high in the opinion polls up to and beyond…

How far should a man be prepared to go for a free meal? Two weeks ago I came 12,000 miles…

The moral high ground is, they believe, exclusively the preserve of environmental activists in their war against fossil fuels. This…

My Sunday starts watching the Wallabies take on Wales. My boys and I are transfixed by the gutsy display of…

Australia needs to take a careful look at its new PM-slaying political culture

Muslim leaders must not hide beneath the deceptive robes of ‘hard’ multiculturalism

Enraged by African-American deaths, Peter Sellars channels his art into dance and re-interpreting the classics

The Dalai Lama, the Pope and the Ayatollah Khameini walk into a press conference … The Dalai Lama re-affirms his…

It should be celebrating its triumphs. Instead it has descended into pointless attention-seeking

A true campaign for equal rights must cross boundaries

How Jeremy Corbyn is building a party of red-brick revolutionaries

It seems extraordinary, but the socialist senator of Vermont could be on track to win the Democratic nomination

Justin Cartwright’s South African notebook

Britain’s new nuclear power plant, if it happens, is guaranteed to produce some of the most expesnive energy in the world

The nuclear deal makes it more vital than ever that Britain helps hold Iran to its obligations

It’s an outdoors place, with puffins, basalt stacks and beaches of what might be mistaken for Caribbean sand

Just over 30 years ago, Margaret Thatcher’s government decided to look at local government finance. A young aide, John Redwood,…

Home Xi Jinping, the ruler of China, came, with his wife Peng Liyuan, a folk singer, for a state visit…

This place was the future once, too. In many ways it still is

Plus: the decline of British steel; and a comparison of prime-ministerial jets

Democracy doesn’t have to mean lack of leadership. But sometimes it does…

From ‘Reprisals’, The Spectator, 23 October 1915: The Germans lately executed Miss Cavell, a good and brave English hospital nurse, on a…

Harsh words Sir: Noreen J. Pryor’s harsh words and insinuations about Rowan Dean in particular and the Spectator in general…

If she backed the Outers it would give her what she has always lacked — a political tribe

Plus: Pooteresque Corbyn; Canada and the niqab; Mrs Thatcher, volume two; Michael Heath’s 80 birthday

But he has helped me complete my collection of angry TV historians

It’s designed so that as many industries as possible can get their snouts in the trough

Plus: Why it’s right to welcome Chinese money; and a spot of le French-bashing

Reviewing two new books on the Third Reich, Dominic Green argues that, by transferring ‘collective will’ to Hitler, the German volk were entirely complicit in Nazi atrocities

Claire Harman’s new biography casts Charlotte not as feminist heroine but as an unhappy, unfulfilled woman, disappointed in all the men closest to her

Slade House, Mitchell’s latest fiction, is an amusing puzzle about the paranormal that defies classification — but I wish he’d return to Cloud Atlas territory

Disappointingly, we are none the wiser for reading Jay Nordlinger’s ‘inquiry’ into the children of 20 dictators — except that Castro’s ten-year-old had plenty to say about the banning of Christmas in Cuba

Fergus Byrne’s biography — not only authorised but commissioned — still makes the manipulative media mogul utterly repellent

Merging fact with fiction, Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone centres on Lennon’s retreat from New York to his lonely Irish island for rest and primal screaming

More Letters of Note, compiled by Shaun Usher — and if you don’t find anything of interest in this enchanting new volume, you are not a proper human being

Gerard Kilroy’s life of Edmund Campion shows how the gifted, charismatic Jesuit never sought a martyr’s fate

Seen from the viewpoint of an IRA terrorist and a hotel manager, Jonathan Lee’s novel High Dive imaginatively recreates the carnage at the 1984 Tory conference in Brighton

Jenny McCartney talks to the unstoppable literary force about the new film adaptation of his novel Brooklyn

But English Touring Opera offers relief with their transgressive romp through Tales of Hoffmann

Plus: two comedies at the Tricycle and Old Red Lion that deliver laughs aplenty

Plus: Courtauld Gallery's excellent display of Peter Lanyon's gliding paintings show a master of the 'airscape'

Listen To Me Marlon has Brando burbling into your ear for 102 minutes. It’s burbling at its most compelling

Plus: the lonely life of the Pitcairn Islanders and a sizzling new Arthur Miller adaptation on Radio 4

Plus: the start of the second series of Channel 4’s Fargo suggests this might be one of the highlights of the TV year

Edward Albee posed the question in 1962: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ The answer, it seems, is no one. There’s…

He is what he is and shows his middle finger to the fourth estate,

I could have listened to Max Arthur on the great warrior all afternoon but the time had come to get pissed

That’s why they dress up in balaclavas and boiler suits and try to thwart a pretend hunt

First there was an anti-tipping movement in Britain and now the first crack has appeared in the American tipping culture

He didn’t include the puncture, his travelling companions or his fit about missing tea with Haille Selassie’s relatives

It’s not surprising that so many bridge players feel such a sentimental attachment to The Young Chelsea. The club was…

When I first studied chess I thought it was a golden age for chess literature. There were the classics such…

Black to play. This position is from Inarkiev-Salem, World Blitz, Berlin 2015. How did Black conclude the attack? Answers to…

In Competition No. 2920 you were invited to submit an extract from a novel written by a rock star of…

One unclued light is the name of a drink which can be measured into three ingredients. Each ingredient has three…

Unclued lights made mottoes around the rim of one-pound coins: (33) NEMO ME (12) IMPUNE (40) LACESSIT, (18) DECUS ET…

Sir Nicholas Serota exaggerates how much the arts have been downgraded in schools and universities since 2010

EU plans to ban all devices except ‘cig-alikes’ will destroy an innovative new industry

Plus: Directory inquiries for the elderly; how to correct a poor compliment

Could this be revenge for the role of Scottish regiments in the Boer War?

But is it the speed or the sting that counts?