The Spectator
Australia
Re-Joyce and Regret
For those who prefer their politics to be pink and their environmentalism deep green, the re-election of Barnaby Joyce as…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
One of my beefs about the ABC is how the Liberal party has stood by and allowed it to become…
Quarantine diary
After 404 days in solitary as a guest of Her Majesty, I was loath to spend a fortnight in institutional…
Australian Features
False gods of public health
Underachievers of the medical profession are ruining the country
Misjudging our Constitution
Judicial activists invented the right to invalidate laws
Features Australia, New Zealand
Maorification of smiling zombies
Labour is remaking New Zealand in its own image
Features
The Pride flag
Last month, the Pride flag was updated by the Intersex Equality Rights UK campaign group — the simple rainbow was…
The Week
Portrait of the Week
Home The government contemplated its promised Planning Bill, blamed for contributing to the astonishing victory for the Liberal Democrat Sarah…
The wrong track
Under what circumstances can a government restrict the liberty of the people? An example was given last year: in a…
Athens and the EU
The EU has regularly been likened to the Roman Empire. But its current direction suggests that the Athenian Empire (478-404…
Columnists
The next horror in store for Keir
I think Keir’s had it. This may not discomfort you terribly, I know. Still less the fact that Labour will…
Why we don’t say it
The official review into the Manchester Arena bombing was published this week. Four years after 22 mainly young people were…
There’s trouble brewing for Boris
Covid restrictions are meant to end on 19 July. But parliament will not return to normal until September. The Commons…
Why private equity sharks are shopping at Morrisons
The late Sir Ken Morrison — founder of the eponymous supermarket chain that’s the latest UK target for US private…
Won’t the Catholic church stand up for mothers?
I’m used to waiting for the Catholic church to make sense. I’m a convert to Catholicism, and Catholic ideas sometimes…
Books
Justice betrayed
It was always an inherently implausible accusation: that Australia’s most senior Catholic prelate had sexually assaulted choir boys after Mass…
A will and a way
Lendal Press has found a brilliant novelist in Matt Cook: funny, shrewd, satirical, disturbingly and entertainingly analytical in his psychology…
Murder and a moral truth
‘There is no end to influence,’ says Harold Bloom in his seminal 1973 work, The Anxiety of Influence — and…
Top notes
We are experiencing a boom of popular books on Greek mythology: Stephen Fry’s Mythos; Natalie Haynes’s Pandora’s Jar; Liv Albert’s…
A light crack of the whip
Orgies! Gangsters! Drugs! Spies! Scandals! This biography promises much but I’m not sure it actually delivers, or not in any…
Monster bunch
I hated reading this book. Not only was it objectively upsetting, as any book describing monkey vivisection would be (I…
More him than her
Ever since Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists, died in 2011, having made it to her 94th year with…
Still funny after all these years
A new biography of William Hogarth pays dutiful homage to his satirical genius but does not challenge its predecessors, writes Philip Hensher
Arts
Anya Taylor Joy stars in the new Mad Max
It’s funny to reflect how the performing arts, theatre in particular, are a lot stronger when they have a literary…
Spring Waters
Recent decades have seen the opening or upgrading of numerous performing arts centres throughout regional Australia enabling the development of…
Queen of Bohemia
Nina Hamnett’s art has long been overshadowed by her wild, hedonistic life, but that is changing, says Hermione Eyre — and about time
Who goes there?
Death of a Black Man is a little-known script from the 1970s written by Alfred Fagon who suffered a fatal…
Howard’s way
There was no printed programme for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s first concert under its music director designate Domingo Hindoyan.…
Agricultural revolution
I was at a party the other day when who should accost me but Jeremy Clarkson. There were lots more…
Aural hot chocolate
I’ve given up comfort food. I’m trying to shift lockdown pounds that have left me with the physique of the…
Sweet nothings
Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to…
Two men and their dog
At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring…
GB News has chutzpah but does it have legs?
Help! If I’m too kind to GB News, my bosses at LBC will be cross as the channel nicked their…
Life
Aussie Life
Every time a dog cocks its leg to urinate on the Federation Pavilion in Centennial Park, Sydney, a terminally ill…
Aussie Language
A report in the Australian said ‘anti-Semitic’ hate crimes are on the rise in America – and the FBI and…
How to lose
Millions of people would see losing to Anand as a privilege rather than a disgrace. So it is simply astonishing…
Let’s go round again
In Competition No. 3204, you were invited to supply a rondeau with a summery theme. The best-known English rondeau is…
Puzzle no. 659
White to play. Gukesh–Yip, Gelfand Challenge, June 2021. White has strong pressure on the f-file, but which move forces a…
2512: Impertinence
Clockwise round the grid from 34 run the answers (6,6,5, 11,4,3,7,4) (one hyphened) to eight riddles followed by the riddler’s…
Critique
Six years ago I wrote here about critique, as a noun or verb, and things have gone from bad to…
Hogwarts and all
Harry Potter is a fictional orphan locked in a cupboard by his aunt and uncle, after which he discovers a…
A lot of bottle
The question is surely destined to become a pub quiz staple: ‘Who moved a bottle 18 inches across a table…
Sense and sensitivity
‘Whatever you do, don’t call them snowflakes,’ Caroline said the last time I spoke to Oxford students. ‘That’s not a…
Solution to 2509: Current description
The perimeter quote is from ‘Ode to the West Wind’. The remaining unclued lights were the east wind (24A), south…





































































