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The Spectator

25 June 2022 Aus

The Bidas touch

Everything Joe touches turns to...

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Australia

Leading article Australia

To go woke or to win?

In a rare outbreak of common sense, one of the world’s international sporting bodies this week decided to ban ‘transgender…

Australian Columnists

Australian Notes

Australian notes

The past two years have seen the trust many Australians’ have in their institutions brought to an all-time low through…

Australian Features

Features Australia

The Bidas touch

Everything Joe touches turns to...

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

Teals are not permanent occupiers of the Liberal heartland

Features Australia

New Noodle Nation

Our National Electricity Market is insane

Features Australia

Perhaps in the next life?

Aussie battlers battle with climate policies

Features Australia

Vaccines on trial

Looks like they really are ‘all in this together’

Features Australia

The Trump Insurrection show

Capitol riot hearings are fatally flawed

Features

Features

A vroom of one’s own

Oh how I loved my old Mini

Features

A blunt instrument

Economic sanctions have never worked

Notes on...

The National Army Museum

Five years ago this month I wrote an article in The Spectator denouncing the National Army Museum after its £24…

Features

The odd couple

Israel and Turkey’s tentative alliance

Features

Putin’s bonanza

Is the Kremlin winning the sanctions war?

Features

To boo or not to boo

Are modern theatre-goers too polite?

Features

The enemy within

Have we reached a new stage in the war against cancer?

Features

Top flight

Why Ryanair is Europe’s best airline

Features

Why we fight

Ukrainians will never accept a fake peace with Putin

The Week

Letters

Letters

Be prepared Sir: The advice of Jeremy Clarke’s Aunty Margaret that he ‘must “get right with the Lord” as a…

Ancient and modern

Labours of love

An Oxford don has raised the prospect of producing a cocktail of hormone pills that would help you to fall…

Barometer

Barometer

Striking differences This summer’s strikes are unlikely to erupt as badly as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 in the…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home A rail strike on three alternate days, bringing the system to a standstill for a week, was organised by…

Diary

Diary

In 1977, when I set up the South Bank Show for ITV, I wanted Paul McCartney to be on the…

Leading article

The only option

A little over a year ago, The Spectator printed a cover story about the risk of inflation. Britain, we argued,…

Columnists

Any other business

All’s calm on my morning train — but it won’t be by autumn

Here I go again, in my occasional role as your intrepid transport correspondent. Last week I reported on airport chaos,…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

If anyone was suitable to be the Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, it was Lord Geidt. Self-effacing, professional, unself-righteous…

Columns

Central bank rate hikes are pathetic

Check out these hyperventilating headlines from last week: ‘What the Fed’s largest interest rate hike in decades means for you’…

Columns

What took you so long, Seb Coe?

There’s a left-wing internet advocacy group called 38 Degrees which suggests to its followers that all they have to do…

Columns

The shame game

In this most holy month of Pride I have been making my observances by thinking about shame. After all, shame…

Columns

British politics is stuck

One of the favourite phrases of British political commentators is ‘oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them’. As with all…

Columns

Carry on Carrie

One is not usually surprised by opinions volunteered to parliamentary hopefuls by voters on whose doors the candidate has knocked;…

Books

More from Books

The horror unfolds

No one had prepared the Allied soldiers, as they began their invasion of the Reich early in 1945, for what…

More from Books

No blame, no shame

If MI5 had a Cold War file on you – paper in those happy days – it didn’t mean they…

More from Books

The power and the glory

Geography, climate, economics and nationalism are often seen as decisive forces in history. In this dynamic, original and convincing book…

More from Books

The wild, wide fen

‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…

More from Books

An interplay of voices

Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System compresses memoir and cultural criticism into one slim, explosive volume, and in doing so…

More from Books

An immorality tale

Has there been a better novel this century than Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation? There might not…

More from Books

The last governor

After 13 years in parliament, rising star Chris Patten had the bad luck to be one of the few Tory…

Lead book review

Animal magic

With the technologies at our disposal, we can in fact now know what it’s like to be a bat, says Caspar Henderson

Arts

Australian Arts

Time takes a cigarette

June 16 was Bloomsday, the day we celebrate James Joyce’s Ulysses, and it was a special Bloomsday because 2022 is…

Theatre

Bloated waffle

The Old Vic’s new show, Jitney, has a mystifying YouTube advert which gives no information about the play or the…

Radio

Overmilking the crime cow

Nothing new under the sun. Or at least it feels that way these days, doesn’t it? The movies are TV…

Cinema

Fever pitch

Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley and it’s cradle to grave but told at such a gallop you’ll…

Opera

Naughty but very nice

Sir David Pountney, it appears, has been to Prague. He’s booked himself a mini-break, he’s EasyJetted out, and after (one…

Arts feature

Shooting star

Tanjil Rashid on the polymathic Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who spearheaded a new school of Indian cinema

Exhibitions

Read his lips

Of all the photos of artists in the studio, the one of Glyn Philpot being served a martini by his…

Television

This will end badly

I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV.…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

It’s too soon to say whether President Biden’s response to the carnage in Tulsa, Uvalde and Buffalo (‘For God’s sake,…

Aussie Life

Language

We live in a world that seems to have largely abandoned punctuation – those small marks between words that help…

The turf

The turf

In a disintegrating country, stuck for the moment with a Prime Minister who can’t see the difference between a proliferation…

No sacred cows

Will my kitchen be designated a ‘safe space’?

As the father of four children who will be entering higher education in the next few years, I’m worried that…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Your problems solved

Q. My girlfriend and I have started using a personal trainer for some joint sessions at our local gym; the…

Drink

Sea fare

One could get used to this. I come from seafaring stock, albeit distant. ‘Anderson’ suggests Viking antecedents, especially as my…

The Wiki Man

Why secondhand cars are first-rate

The Department for Transport recently ended a £1,500 subsidy towards the price of new, lower-priced electric cars one year earlier…

Bridge

Bridge

At a bridge tournament about 15 years ago, I started chatting to a friendly, eccentric woman in her mid-sixties, wearing…

Low life

Low life

Nothing in the beach hotel was made of plastic. It wasn’t advertised as being a plastic-free hotel, but we noticed…

Real life

Real life

‘Do you care about the woodland? Do you care about the wildlife?’ shouted the bearded Woodland Trust volunteer from his…

Mind your language

Odious

Lord Geidt said in his resignationletter that he had been put in an odious position. He meant it was hateful,though…

High life

High life

It’s nice to be back on the old continent again, especially after getting within a couple of hundred yards of…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2558: Blonde, 78

Unclued lights were associated with JUBILEE: years (CALENDAR, SCHOOL, FINANCIAL), clips (CROCODILE,PAPER, TIE) and London underground lines (CENTRAL, CIRCLE, NORTHERN).…

Crossword

2561: PORTS

Six unclued entries comprise systematically ordered non-words thematically linked by a normal entry, itself unclued.   Across 1 Awaiting consideration,…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 708

White to play. Rezasade-Movsesian, Bundesliga 2022. White was an underdog in this game, but found a subtle winning idea. What…

Competition

Hard times

In Competition No. 3254, you were invited to tweak a well-known book title to reflect the straitened times we live…

Chess

Cream of the Candidates

The Candidates tournament is underway in Madrid, where eight of the world’s best players vie for the right to challenge…