The Spectator
25 November 2023 Aus
Can Israel keep the West on side?
Australia
Mining and agriculture celebrated
Mining and agriculture. Two words that should stir the heart of every Australian. Two words that sum up our glorious…
Australian Features
Interfaith solidarity must be a two-way street
Muslim leaders have collectively failed the victims of 10/7
Sunak’s bizarre lurch leftwards
A ‘Conservative’ government sacks its senior conservative
Israel falsely accused
‘Colonialism’, ‘apartheid’ and ‘genocide’ are offensive nonsense
Features
Why so many teenagers support Palestine
I’m a sixth-former in one of Britain’s largest comprehensives and know no one who supports Israel over Palestine. Some readers…
Can Israel keep the West on side?
Jerusalem On 7 October, Israeli security officials were already questioning how long they would be allowed to fight in Gaza.…
What prison taught me
I confess I never expected to see myself going to the lavatory on prime-time national TV. In fact, the expedition…
The Week
Columnists
Books
The horrors of the ‘Upskirt Decade’
The century began as a monstrous time to be famous and female – epitomised by the Tulsa judge who, in 2006, seemed to rule that no woman had a right to privacy in public
No nonsense in the kitchen
The forthright food columnist Rachel Cooke has little patience with faddy eaters, ‘meditative’ kitchen tasks or the craze for Portuguese custard tarts
The last battle: The Future, by Naomi Alderman, reviewed
Sinister preparations for the apocalypse by a few Silicon Valley billionaires must be thwarted in this part-thriller, part-Big Tech critique, part-meditation on doomsday
The Duke of Windsor had much to be thankful for
Defending the ‘maligned’ Duke, Jane Marguerite Tippett fails to mention how hard officials worked to suppress evidence of his treachery and prevent a court martial in 1940
A multicultural microcosm: Brooklyn Crime Novel, by Jonathan Lethem, reviewed
Lethem returns to the borough with a tale of violence, neglect and demographic change over the decades, tinged with nostalgia but far from sentimental
The real problem with ChatGPT is that it can never make a joke
When Andy Stanton commands the AI program to tell him a story about a blue whale with a tiny penis, the result, as it unfolds, drives him a bit insane
Surreal visions: the best of this year’s art books reviewed
Subjects include Anna Atkins’s cyanotypes, Leonora Carrington’s paintings, Albrecht Dürer’s dreams and the photographs of Lee Miller
Arts
Eye-batting nonchalance
What is it about the Egyptians that bewitches us? Ramses and the Gold of the Pharoahs opened at the Australian…
Life
Kiwi life
Given the UK’s Rishi Sunak sacking Suella Braverman for saying what many others would feel – that the police were…
Language
My Australian Word of the Year for 2023 is ‘No’. I made the announcement this week on Peta Credlin’s show…
Spectator competition winners: John Milton’s ‘Three Blind Mice’
In Competition No. 3326 you were invited to submit a nursery rhyme recast in the style of a well-known poet.…












































































