The Spectator
Australia
Another dud debate
The third debate between Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the man who doesn’t appear terribly hungry to take his job…
Australian Features
I lost my job because of trans activism
We need a UK-style ruling on sex from our High Court, too
Albo will give us a banana republic
Do Australians seriously want another term of Labor?
Features
Why won’t Hitler conspiracies die?
Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining…
My battle to avoid boredom
Four days ago I was so bored that I considered starting a terrorist groupuscule. I had no demands, no ideology,…
How Rome copes with the Conclave
Ordinary Romans, famous for their cheerful working-class familiarity, loved Pope Francis for his common touch. For the first time in…
The extraordinary scale of the crisis facing the next pope
At 9.47 a.m. on Easter Monday we heard the words ‘con profondo dolore’ from a cardinal standing in the chapel…
Pope Francis had his priorities right
After he emerged from the Gemelli hospital in Rome last month, Pope Francis put out a reflection on ‘hospital’. Some…
Middle-class parents are creating a new breed of brat
I recently reconnected with an old friend; I went to his house and met his children for the first time.…
Conservatives all over the Anglosphere are paying the price for Trump
It is the great good fortune of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to be united by a common language,…
Long live the long lunch!
I keep on my bedside table, where others might place religious texts, Keith Waterhouse’s seminal The Theory and Practice of…
We should be excited about signs of alien life
Last week, a team of astronomers led by the University of Cambridge professor Nikku Madhusudhan announced that they had found…
The Week
What would Livy have made of Trump’s treatment of Harvard?
It is not surprising that Donald Trump holds the law in contempt. That is what happens when you have a…
Portrait of the week: Pope dies, EU cheese banned and trans women aren’t women
Home Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, no longer believes that a trans woman is a woman, his official spokesman…
The law that is choking civil society
If one were to ask for a quintessential display of the British character it would be hard to better the…
Men are allowed to fail, too
The weather in Bath has been preposterously good, with the Royal Crescent glowing in a soft, lemony light. I’m here…
Which pope has served the longest?
Papal reign The mostly elderly runners and riders to be the next pope are unlikely to challenge the record for…
Letters: Bring back mutton
Man out of time Sir: That Mary Wakefield left Rowan Williams ‘with my questions for the most part unresolved’ will…
Columnists
Lily Parr and the creepiness of AI resurrection
I’m not sure it’s possible to make a horror movie more sinister than the chirpy four-minute film on YouTube purporting…
The hidden violence behind the trans ruling
It is ten months since the then merely aspirant education secretary Bridget Phillipson addressed the important issue of where transgender…
The secret behind Reform’s local election campaign
It is an irony of Brexit that, since we left the EU, British politics has become more European. The local…
When will the BBC ever learn?
They say that death and taxes are the only certain things in this life. I would add BBC bias into…
After Francis, who?
After Francis, what, or rather, who? The coverage so far, rightly admiring of the Pope’s unvarnished, rather un-papal Christianity, has…
Save London’s black cabs!
Donald Trump’s Soprano-like threat that the ‘termination’ of Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘cannot come fast enough’ has been headlined…
The joy of Channel Island hopping
Seldom has a collective term been less appropriate: ‘the Channel Islands’ – as though these were in any sense (other…
Books
‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts
Bourgeois homes in the early 19th century became ‘virtual museums of death’, with models of heroes jostling replicas of the hands and feet of lost loved ones
Bloodbath at West Chapple farm
Fifty years after its original publication, John Cornwell’s account of the Devon murder mystery involving three dysfunctional siblings remains as haunting as ever
My adventures in experimental music – by David Keenan
In pieces dating from 1998 to 2015, the ‘rock evangelist’ interviews the revolutionary musicians of the time and recalls the ‘beautiful shambles’ of the first gig he ever attended
Adrift in strange lands: The Accidentals, by Guadalupe Nettel, reviewed
A sense of unease runs through Nettel’s latest short stories as the protagonists start to lose their bearings in increasingly unfamiliar scenarios
Friends fall out in the English civil war
Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, close colleagues in the 1630s, find themselves on opposite sides in the bitter conflict a decade later
The benign republic of Julian Barnes
The novelist presents his utopia – of unilateral disarmament and the public ownership of transport – in the tone of a thoughtful vicar giving an anodyne sermon somewhere in the Home Counties
The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed
Watts skilfully conjures a sense of impending doom as a young couple’s expedition to the American Southwest is threatened by deadly fires sweeping through California
The story of food in glorious technicolour
Jenny Linford explores the global history of cooking and eating through specific items from the British Museum spanning recorded history
Time is running out for the world’s great rivers
Overfishing, industrial pollution and dams are squeezing life from once revered waterways that have sustained civilisations for centuries
Arts
A passable Antipodean
Isn’t it strange the way the popular and high art aspects of our culture keep connecting and intersecting. A friend…
Poulenc’s Stabat Mater – sacred, fervent and always on the verge of breaking into giggles
It’s funny what you see at orchestral concerts. See, that is, not just hear. If you weren’t in the hall…
My Marco Pierre White obsession
Pierre White, Marco. Chef. Michelin stars: five (all handed back). Wives: three (all handed back). Restaurants owned: number unclear. Hours…
Winning little narrative adventure: South of Midnight reviewed
Grade: A– For this winning little narrative adventure we are in the South – all gris-gris gumbo yaya, decaying mansions…
The case for replacing nurses with robots
Tending is a work of activism on behalf of the NHS. The script brings together the testimony of 70 nurses…
‘I’ve seen controllers come and go’: Radio 3’s Michael Berkeley interviewed
A few years ago I had a panic-stricken phone call from a female friend. ‘Help!’ she wailed. ‘Remind me what…
The polarising poet, sculptor and ‘avant-gardener’ who maintained a private militia
Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who…
It should be illegal for TV baddies to profit from their psychopathic acts
I’m about to give away the opening scene of the latest gangsters-are-cool drama MobLand. Don’t worry. It won’t spoil anything.…
The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler
One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems…
Life
Aussie life
I happened to be in London when the UK’s Supreme Court confirmed what many people have long suspected about women…
Language
Everyone who has ever worked in an election campaign knows what a ‘corflute’ is. We have all seen them even…
Northern Europe doesn’t get salads: Claro reviewed
Claro is at 12 Waterloo Place, St James’s, and, when I tried to find out what it used to be…
Dear Mary: Must I take my mother-in-law’s hideous cast-offs?
Q. My soon-to-be mother-in-law has started off-loading large amounts of her expensive but hideous cast-off clothes on to me. I…
The day the King came to Ravenna
Dante’s Beach, Ravenna ‘Fortune’s a right whore: If she give aught, she deals it in small parcels,/ That she may…
Help! I’m turning into Basil Fawlty
Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very…
Is an Epsom renaissance on the way?
Through 30 years of living within walking distance of the Derby course I was ever hopeful of seeing Epsom’s status…
A football regulator would be an own goal
It’s that time of the year again in football when the Championship sweeps all before it: it’s full of joy…
Is the end of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ in sight?
Could the end of non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) be in sight? As the head of the Free Speech Union, I’ve…












































































