PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

26 August 2017 Aus

University challenge

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

Burqas and bigots

When the first pictures emerged of Afghan women celebrating the demise of the Taliban by scornfully tearing off their blue…

Australian Columnists

Australian Notes

Australian notes

Shorten must be stopped For once, Malcolm Turnbull’s current travails are not all his own fault. The Prime Minister could…

Diary Australia

Sicilian diary

‘Muslims will not blow anyone up here,’ the proprietor of my Siracusa local assures me, ‘we have our own people…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Man of peace

By any measure, the trajectory of Sheikh Imam Tawhidi to public prominence has been remarkable. From relative obscurity in South…

Features Australia

Burqas and waffle

Whatever else may be said about her, Pauline Hanson’s action in wearing a burqa into the Senate, despite the sobbing…

Features Australia

Business/Robbery etc

Equality of opportunity, not of outcomes; it’s the classic free enterprise backbone of Liberal philosophy. So attacking Bill Shorten’s politics-of-envy…

Features Australia

Hype is renewable

The announcement of a $650 million solar power plant near the South Australian town of Port Augusta brought forth the…

Features Australia

Silent revolt

It all started when a contact at the ABC forwarded me a memo which had been circulated to all ABC…

Features Australia

‘I’m offended’ has won

Earlier in the year, Janet Albrechtsen wrote in the Australian that ‘the cult of taking offence was running rife on…

Features Australia

On the wrong side of history?

No one wants to be on the wrong side of history. But without hindsight, it can be difficult to work…

Features

Features

University challenge

In a few weeks, a new intake of students will arrive, all fresh-faced and excited, at universities around the country.…

Features

Passage from India

It is not fashionable to feel sympathy for the men and women who lived and served in the British colonies…

Features

Unsafe spaces

As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt.…

Features

The dice men

‘I have a slight bone to pick with you,’ I tell Ian Livingstone as he makes me a cup of…

Features

Macron marches on

The rentrée politique in France next month promises to be the most exciting in decades as the dynamic superstar president…

Features

Puppy love

There have been times since the break-up when I’ve felt so low I’ve opened a bottle of Shiraz and spent…

On the up: Saltburn-by-the-Sea’s funicular railway

Features

Saltburn-by-the-Sea

When towns are on the up, there is a brief period when they inhabit what I would call the Goldilocks…

The Week

Leading article

Hard lessons

George Tomlinson, the post-war education secretary, declared that politicians should leave exams to the teachers because ‘the minister knows nowt…

Letters

Letters

In defence of General Lee Sir: In your leader ‘America’s identity crisis’ (19 August) you state that ‘When General Lee…

Diary

Diary

It has been a summer of tears, both of joy and sorrow. The latter first: how could stones not weep…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home Big Ben ceased sounding for a planned period of four years, thanks to a decision by the Speaker and…

Columnists

James Delingpole

The heartbreaking story of Pecky, a young green woodpecker

Ever since I was a child, I’d always yearned to see a green woodpecker. With its scarlet cap and lime-green…

Rod Liddle

We’re losing the cat-and-mouse terror game

I wonder how Mohammad Khan is getting on in his legal action against Virgin Atlantic. Mo — a Muslim, the…

Any other business

The truth about Brexit? One professor’s guess is no better than another’s

Removing all trade and tariff barriers as part of a hard Brexit would generate ‘a £135 billion annual boost to…

World Politics

From ‘America first’ to ‘pragmatic realism’

So much for Donald J. Trump, ‘America first’ isolationist. Gone is the man who, as a civilian, repeatedly endorsed a…

Books

Books

Return to the lost city

During a press interview in Bombay about his latest book, the author-narrator of Friend of My Youth feels ‘a surge…

Books

Light at the end

It’s an irony of our secular age that the more we fear death, the more enticing we find it. The…

At feeding time, Jacqueline Yallop’s pigs splash their noses through the grain, ‘bringing them up white and floury, like old-fashioned Sherbet Dabs’

Books

Swine fever

‘Rightly is they called pigs,’ says a farmworker in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow as he watches porkers grunt and squelch.…

Books

Manning up

Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first…

Books

Making sense of an unjust world

These three timely works of creative nonfiction explore the question of race: chronicling histories of colonialism and migration; examining the…

James Gillray’s ‘The Wig’. Hairdressing was a good time to catch up on the latest novel

Books

The pleasures of reading aloud

‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her…

Books

Rumbles in the jungle

A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned…

A pile of mud-covered satchels is all that remains of 74 children’s lives

Books

A tidal wave of grief

Most victims of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake — which convinced Voltaire there could be no God — perished not in…

Arts

Power of two: Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim play a duet at this year’s Lucerne Festival

Music

Mistaken identity

This year’s Lucerne Festival is given its identity by having as its theme ‘Identity’. Since the word doesn’t mean anything,…

Music

Twin peaks

Schoenberg began Gurrelieder in 1900, but he didn’t hear it until 1913. By then, he’d moved on, and he ostentatiously…

The Heckler

Arcade Fire: Everything Now

Grade: D+ Well, this is truly awful. Perhaps the worst album by a major band since Mardi Gras by Creedence…

Radio

Universal appeal

Yet another sign that we are living in very strange times: a pair of celebrities, their names made by TV,…

Culture Buff

Hamlet Glyndebourne Festival

Shakespeare’s plays have frequently been the source of operas. Almost as frequently the operas have been only modest successes. Notable…

‘Mum On The Couch’, 2017, by Gary Hume

Arts feature

What lies beneath

Last year, Gary Hume made a painting of himself paddling. At a casual glance, or even a longer look, it…

Going platinum: Daniel Craig as Joe Bang in Logan Lucky

Cinema

Losing the plot

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky is a heist caper that, to be fair, does what it says on the can. There…

Autistic endeavour: Keir Gilchrist as Sam in Atypical

Television

For goodness’ sake

Most new Netflix series are greeted not merely with acclaim, but with a level of gratitude that the returning Christ…

Life

Competition

Reprogramming

In Competition No. 3012 you were invited to change a letter in the title of a well-known play and submit…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. I am in my seventies and my husband is in his nineties. The other night we had two couples…

Mind your language

Sixteen-hundreds

I was puzzled by the caption to a picture in the Times Literary Supplement. The picture showed a model of…

Wild life

Wild life

Indian Ocean coast Like most men I wonder if I have been much good as a father, but one thing…

Chess

Philidor’s heir

There was a time when France was the dominant power in world chess. When Howard Staunton commenced his remarkable series…

Chess puzzle

no. 471

White to play. This position is a variation from Vachier-Lagrave–Nepomniachtchi, St Louis 2017. How can White make a decisive material…

Crossword

2324: In the frame

Each of twenty-one clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter.…

Crossword solution

to 2321: Cleaner

The key word is DENTIFRICE (38), which can be divided into DENT defining 11, 21, 33; IF 13, 20, 27;…

Drink

The countryside’s eternal youth

I once witnessed a rarer spectacle than Halley’s Comet. I heard Ted Heath tell a funny story. It related to…

High life

High life

When the Germans smuggled arguably the world’s most evil man into Russia 100 years ago, they did not imagine the…

Low life

Low life

My mother has various chronic illnesses and finds it almost impossible to remain both immobile and awake during the day.…

Real life

Real life

Darcy is high-maintenance, so I decided to leave her in the posh livery yard, with its luxuriant shavings beds and…

Status anxiety

As easy as 1, 2, 3…

The amount of nonsense being talked about the new GCSEs in English and maths, whereby exams have been graded 9-1…

The Wiki Man

Want greater diversity? Try being less fair

In its hasty dismissal of James Damore, Google showed a worrying disregard for one of the most important freedoms within…

Bridge

Bridge

The ‘Lightner double’ is perfectly named: a bolt out of the blue which strikes fear into your heart. There you…