PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

Alarming antisemitism

As the country prepares for Australia Day, many Australians fear what is happening to our tolerant society. It has taken…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

Here at the Joseph Stalin Centre for Law Reform – and before we go any further, we do not want…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Rotherham, Rochdale, Wadeye?

Crimes in remote communities are being ignored like Muslim rape gangs

Features Australia

Immigrants grow economies

Governments can’t afford to restrict migration despite the backlash

Features Australia

Importing the third world

The cost of accepting immigrants who don’t share our values is too high

Features Australia

Truly a sliding door moment

Will Australians vote to stay on the Labor train or switch to the Coalition?

Features Australia

Civic virtue or vice

We must cultivate good citizenship or face dire consequences

Features Australia

Australia the outlier

The cowardice of the Liberals is putting them in last place in the Anglosphere

Features Australia

Still demonising No-vax

Justice for the unvaccinated is coming with Trump

Features Australia

Trump saw off Trudeau

Let’s hope he sees off Albanese

Features

Features

My neighbour has kidnapped my beavers

My beavers have been kidnapped. A few months ago there were five of them living on my family’s farm on…

Features

How Pierre Poilievre led Canada’s Conservatives back from the wilderness

Ottawa For the past fortnight, Canada’s parliament has been empty. When Justin Trudeau resigned as Liberal leader, he announced a…

Features

Energy prices are shattering Britain’s remaining potteries

The ceramics industry of Stoke-on-Trent is one of the great survivors of the Victorian era. At its height, some 70,000…

Features

There’s nothing sexy about a sex party

‘Sorry sir, the rules clearly state that all single men must be accompanied by a woman.’ As the frustrated guest…

Features

Unmade in Britain: we’re becoming a zero-industrial society

The French sociologist Alain Touraine coined the term ‘post-industrial society’ in 1969. By the 1980s it had become shorthand for…

Features

The Trump resistance is dead

The special relationship is dead, long live the special relationship. On Friday, at a ‘Stars and Stripes & Union Jack…

Features

Cornwall’s gypsies face eviction

‘Don’t use our real names,’ says the teenage gypsy. ‘Other gypsies will laugh at us.’ Even in a tracksuit, the…

Features

The Pope’s revenge: why the new Archbishop of Washington is such a controversial choice

For an 88-year-old man who has spent only five days in the United States and doesn’t speak English, Pope Francis…

Features

Charities are swapping altruism for activism

Charity no longer begins at home. It starts with a thunderous denunciation of western sins, promotes an excoriation of this…

Notes on...

Confessions of a Costco Guy

Those who use TikTok, or are familiar with Ed Davey’s dance routines on social media, may have heard of the…

The Week

Diary

Give David Beckham a knighthood

Donald Trump descends on Davos as if he were in Apocalypse Now. Four years ago I saw his cavalcade of…

Leading article

Why won’t Keir Starmer use the word ‘terrorist’?

Why does Keir Starmer find it so hard to use the word ‘terrorist’ when talking about a man who buys…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Trump’s inauguration, Israel-Hamas ceasefire and cardboard humans comfort lonely fish

Home Axel Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty to the murder of three girls in a knife attack at a Taylor Swift-themed…

Columnists

Columns

Britain is losing friends – and making enemies

Whatever way you voted in 2016, I suspect that many of us have the same image of post-Brexit Britain. It…

The Spectator's Notes

Will Trump remember his allies?

I had thought that having to be inaugurated indoors would have cramped Donald Trump’s style. Not so. The rhetoric with…

Columns

Is Keir Starmer a lawyer or a leader?

Keir Starmer surprised his colleagues during his first week in power when he appointed his old friend Richard Hermer KC…

Columns

The truth about Southport

When I first saw the headline I was highly optimistic. Sir Keir Starmer had identified the threat to society posed…

Columns

Immigration’s theatre of the absurd

On the cusp of an almighty row over Trump’s planned mass deportations, let’s look to Europe for light relief. Last…

Any other business

Would it be worth Trump buying Greenland?

London’s capital market needs a kick in the pants, as I write every week, and ‘activist investors’ are no bad…

Books

More from Books

The crude tirades of Cicero the demagogue

Far from being a crusader for virtue, the Roman statesman is seen as a violent firebrand, disregarding the law when it suited him and laying the groundwork for Julius Caesar’s assassination

More from Books

Never underestimate the complexities of African history

Too many commentators, Luke Pepera included, extrapolate from one region they know well to a continent boasting a multitude of religions, languages and ethnic roots

More from Books

The secret of Gary Lineker’s success

The Leicester-born striker was neither exceptionally skilful nor assiduous; but he worked out how to score goals, and later excel in broadcasting, through intelligence and calm resilience

Lead book review

For all its fame, the Great Siege of Malta made no difference to the course of history

The victorious Hospitallers soon subsided into genteel irrelevance, while the Ottomans remained a formidable Mediterranean power for centuries to come

More from Books

The splatter of green and yellow that caused uproar in the Victorian art world

A double biography of John Ruskin and James Whistler describes in detail the notorious feud between the prominent critic and the flamboyant post-Impressionist

More from Books

The self-serving delusions of the ‘Swastika Kaiser’

With the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the eldest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II decided he was best off allying himself with the Nazis, and seeing what he could obtain for his family in the process

More from Books

Why do we assume smell is our weakest sense?

When it comes to the power of association, smell is unmatched, says Jonas Olofsson. It can take us back to childhood in an instant

More from Books

The ghost of his father haunts Winston Churchill

In a whimsical piece written by Churchill in 1947, Lord Randolph’s ethereal figure appears in the studio at Chartwell – to muse on the possibility of a political career for his son

More from Books

A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother

More from Books

This other Eden: Adam and Eve in Paradise, by Eça de Queirós, reviewed

Published in 1897, Queiros’s novella revisits Christianity’s first man and woman, departing from the Creation story in ways both playful and profound

Arts

Australian Arts

Nothing like a Dame

Art takes every possible shape and size. The exhibition of Japanese ukiyo-e prints (running at the National Gallery of Australia…

Pop

Like lying down in front of a bulldozer: the Jesus Lizard, at the Electric Ballroom, reviewed

Many indie types from the 1980s and 1990s were secretly metal fans. But it’s not something they ever really wanted…

Cinema

A classy potboiler – but it’s no Citizen Kane: The Brutalist reviewed

The Brutalist, which is a fictional account of a Jewish-Hungarian architect in postwar America, has attracted a great deal of…

Arts feature

Was Brazil the real birthplace of modernism?

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they…

Television

Certainly intriguing: Apple TV+’s Prime Target reviewed

Needless to say, there have been any number of thrillers that rely on what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin: something,…

Theatre

Pious bilge: Kyoto, at @sohoplace, reviewed

The West End’s new political show, Kyoto, can’t be classed as a drama. A drama involves a main character engaged…

Dance

A jewel in the English National Ballet’s crown: Giselle reviewed

Since its première in Paris in 1841, Giselle has weathered a bumpy ride. For St Petersburg in 1884, Petipa gave…

Radio

It’s moving to think how happy Van Gogh was in Brixton

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it…

Opera

A committed performance of Lerner and Weill’s flop: Opera North’s Love Life reviewed

Once upon a time on Broadway, Igor Stravinsky composed a ballet for Billy Rose’s revue Seven Lively Arts. After the…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

The public shaming of elite pole vault coach Alex Parnov reminds me of the time I was sent to cover…

Aussie Life

Language

We missed it! Back on January 18 we should have been celebrating National Thesaurus Day. Mind you, the day is…

Drink

The Reagan effect on wine lists

Let us indulge in a slight paraphrase. What rough beast slouches towards the White House to be reborn? The inauguration…

No sacred cows

The Trump I (barely) know

I can’t say I know the new President of the United States very well, but during the five years I…

The Wiki Man

The case for ‘Areas of Outstanding Natural Ugliness’

I was leaving the car park of my local shop yesterday – a manoeuvre which involves a hair-raising reverse on…

More from life

Hunter’s chicken: the ultimate cheer-me-up-quickly recipe

Pub food in Britain has had a mixed reputation over the years. For a long time, the most a pub…

Wild life

Like my father before me, I’ve found comfort in yoga

Malindi, Kenya In 1967, Tanzania’s socialist rulers seized all my parents’ property – their ranchland, their home and their cattle…

Real life

Marriage is corny and pointless – but we’re doing it anyway

The one question the priest did not ask me, thank goodness, was why I wanted to get married. That might…

Long life

Learning is a lifelong joy

‘I love learning about things’ (Amelia, aged nine). Not all children do, but many who have not experienced the pleasure…