The Spectator
Australia
We are not Anzacs in this crisis
One hundred and five years ago today, our boys stormed the barren shores of Anzac Cove. For all the Victoria…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
After the cancellation of the Tokyo Olympics, the postponement of the 2020 Tour de France couldn’t have taken many people…
Easter diary
Chocolate eggs still. Tick. Roast dinner still. Tick. Church still. Tick. But as if in a strange, distorting dream. This…
Australian Features
Stop the world, we want to change it!
Leftists are tailoring Covid-19 to their own agendas
An excitable right-wing polemicist replies
Those High Court appointments were dreadful, by George!
Now wash your hands
Xi Jinping cannot evade responsibility for his deadly global disaster
Features
Comedian’s notebook
Empathy and kindness in these difficult times come more easily to some than others, but I’m trying. I had heart…
The shape of the future
Could the Covid crisis be an economic opportunity for Brexit Britain?
Covers that almost were
Sometimes The Spectator goes to press very shortly after election results have been announced. In those instances, Morten Morland, our…
Beards
Viewers of the BBC News channel, now that Zoom shows talking heads in their own homes, want before anything to…
The Week
Happy hebdomaversary
The Spectator’s 10,000th hebdomaversary (hebdomas, ‘a group of seven’: a weekly cannot have an anniversary) will surely be celebrated with…
The case for trust
Our Plan is entirely new, comprising – 1. The whole News of the Week: selected, sifted, condensed and arranged as…
Portrait of the Week
Home The number of people with the coronavirus disease Covid-19 who had died in hospitals by the beginning of the…
Columnists
Real problems erase fake ones
Last week, a friend quoted a two-year-old email of mine: ‘I’m starting to root for a plague or world war…
The pharma giant that will show us the future of capitalism
Keep your eye on GlaxoSmithKline. The UK-based multinational drug-maker represents the future, both as a mass-producer of the vaccines that…
The Spectator’s notes
Although I once edited this paper, and have written for it for almost 40 years, I did not know that…
An outbreak of bad manners
It all started on the day after the Brexit referendum. People who do not get the result they voted for…
An infectious uncertainty
I had thought that actually getting the coronavirus would bring clarity — that there would be some satisfaction in meeting…
I love my strange, disagreeable tribe
It’s one way to keep in touch with people. Each morning, somewhere between the first coffee of the day and…
The difficult balance of public vs political agony
Fear is the politician’s friend. When terror grips the public, an opportunity arises for those in power to step forward…
Would Churchill have worn a face mask?
The problem with face masks is cutting an opening of the right size to accommodate a cigarette, without the hole…
Books
Stepmothers, and other bad apples
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…
The inner circle from hell
Putin’s corrupt cronies may change, but the paranoid world view they all share remains the same, says Owen Matthews
Tales of Jolly Jack Tar
Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of…
Deepest, darkest desires
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing…
The infamous five
Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes,…
The sky’s the limit
‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other…
High culture on the hill
With its distinctive hilly site and unusually coherent architecture (significantly, most of it domestic rather than civic), Hampstead has always…
A mad social whirl
The name Arthur Jeffress may not conjure many associations for those not familiar with the London post-war art world, but…
The reluctant style guru
Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her…
Arts
The Elgin Marbles
He grew up in Eastwood on Sydney’s Northern Line. Geoffrey Robertson’s brilliant career got off to a flying start with…
Forget me not
No surprise: the greatest musical experience of my life was Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1962. I thought at the time…
Turns of the century
Not looking great, is it? Until we all get jabbed, theatres may have to stay closed. And even the optimists…
On the contrary
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
A kind of magic
You have to admire the spirit of the organisers of last weekend’s One World: Together at Home concert. To put…
‘I think I’ve found a real paradise’
Martin Gayford talks to David Hockney about life in the Norman countryside under quarantine, how the iPad is better than paint and brush, and why he is not a communist
Don’t look now
As all other publications are offering guides saying what to watch from home during this pandemic — ‘the 50 best…
Watcher of the skies – and the coffee pot
‘To be recognised and accepted by a peregrine,’ wrote J.A. Baker in 1967, ‘you must wear the same clothes, travel…
View from the back end
From Enoch Powell to Danny La Rue: Hilary Spurling looks back on her time in charge of the arts and books pages in the 1960s
Shock and gore
There were plenty of TV shows around this week designed to cheer us up. Sky Atlantic’s Gangs of London, however,…
Life
The illusion of certainty
The newspapers are full of stories about how small groups of engineers from Formula 1 teams have been able to…
Solution to 2451: Cretinous
Unclued lights are anagrams of the names of countries (anagram of Cretinous): UNHOARDS (1A: anagram of Honduras), ATWAIN (5: Taiwan),…
2454: 17 Across
Thirteen unclued lights are of a kind (all singular, not plural) and confirmed in Chambers. 17 across gives the puzzle’s…
Anniversary clerihews
In Competition No. 3145, to mark the 10,000th issue of The Spectator, you were invited to submit clerihews (two couplets,…
Puzzle No. 601
Black to play. Sjugirov–Carlsen, Chess24 Banter Blitz Semi Final. In this wild position, Carlsen’s next move put the result beyond…
FantasticStar beats MagzyBogues
‘I’m just completely collapsing in these games… unbelievable.’ World Champion Magnus Carlsen didn’t hide his anguish after losing a game…
Furlough
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to…
If you really want to lose friends, start a magazine
I’m more impressed than most that The Spectator has racked up 10,000 issues, because I used to be a magazine…

















































































