He pauses, he stutters, he umms and he ahhs. Hesitant moments as his hands wave meaninglessly in the air; awkward…

Changing the leader when the going gets tough?

Australian athletes only managed to get two silvers at the Beijing World Athletics Championships. But the good news is that…

The Fort Worth Hilton’s concierge could not have been more helpful. ‘Welcome to the land of liberty,’ he said, after…

Conservative antipathy to Malcolm Turnbull isn’t an economic question, it’s an evolutionary one

As Russia and Iran plot to reshape the Middle East in their image, a neutered Obama sits on his hands

Will Malcolm Turnbull be able to hold back the rising tide of illiberal liberalism?

My response to Alex Ryvchin’s Speccie article ‘Radio Gaga’

Our thuggish unions are no better than American beauty salons

The season’s bright brilliant days send the blood rushing through the veins

The Dalai Lama is right: the UK's China policy is about 'money money money" - where the sale comes first

The government says it has ‘turned the page’ on Tibet. Its spiritual leader is amused

Our Syria plans have been a total shambles – leaving a vacuum for Russia's

Indian magnate Nirmal Sethia on what the English get wrong about tea and taxation

Constitutional monarchy is a cornerstone of many stable democracies – so why are we so keen to avoid it in places like Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan?

Memories of partying with the notorious Oxford drinking society

The Labour leader isn’t the angry atheist you might expect – and that could help him reassure the public

Tur(n)bulence ahead Sir: I find I disagree with the sentiments expressed in your cover article (Turnbull’s Treachery) of 19 September.…

Pope Francis should take a break from saving the world to do more for the Christians of the Middle East

Home In a speech at the Shanghai stock exchange, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced a feasibility study…

Also in the historian Tom Holland’s diary: Æthelflæd, the most remarkable forgotten Englishwoman; and our duty to hedgehogs

Plus: how dangerous is rugby?; how expensive is nuclear power?

Labour’s new boss knows everything about claiming the high ground and nothing about the art of the possible

From ‘The will of the majority’, The Spectator, 18 September 1915: The minority may declare, as have some of the trade…

Blairites are coming to terms with the consequences of their ‘lack of moral authority’ – and emotional intelligence

The real disgust wasn’t about the pig’s head. It was about the awful band Supertramp

We must keep a sense of trust in a fragmented society full of beggars, egotists, cold callers and scam artists

It’s shameful, yes, but almost everyone who went to public school in the late 1970s ended up with a prog-rock habit

Plus: Corbyn and the City; the fall, rise and fall of Redcar steel; and your responses on non-execs and the Living Wage

1606 was not only the year of Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra, but of plague, witchcraft and explosive politics, all vividly captured in James Shapiro’s latest tour de force

Nixon is reindicted, in Joan Brady’s America’s Dreyfus — for besmirching forever the reputation of lawyer and diplomat Alger Hiss

Jones’s floating lines and rumpled landscapes are handsomely illustrated in Ariane Bankes’s and Paul Hills’s tribute to his ‘Vision and Memory’

As Allen completes his 47th film, two new biographies pay tribute to his genius as a director on the eve of his 80th birthday

Britain may have lost its empire — but it’s still a superpower when it comes to popular culture, argues Dominic Sandbrook's latest book

Pakenham’s latest book sees him mourn the loss of his trees from disease or storm damage as though they were close friends

If only Max Porter were less under Ted Hughes’s wing, his striking verse novella, Grief is a Thing with Feathers, would properly have taken flight and soared

Boyd has captured a certain female voice perfectly in his superbly written and desperately moving novel, Sweet Caress

Clare and Christy Campbell tell the heart-rending story of the heroic war dogs who sacrificed their lives (usually pointlessly) for their country

In The Past, a family gathering in a Devon country house turns into a tight-lipped drama

Gavin Stamp returns to the subject of George Gilbert Scott, architect of the Albert Memorial, St Pancras and plenty more pinnacled Victorian extravaganzas

The popularity of Writers’ Festivals is a growing cultural phenomenon matched by the boom in book groups. Now, book groups…

Jenny McCartney talks to the celebrated photojournalist about war, guilt and Aylan

And how Russian mysticism powered the Soviet Union’s dreams of space exploration

Gysin exhibited with Duchamp, introduced Burroughs to the cut-up and invented the Dream Machine. Now the art outsider’s paintings are on show at the October Gallery

‘Celts: art and identity’ is an exhibition that is both visually seductive and intellectually complex

Plus: a new show about education at the Old Vic that makes you want to sack the teaching profession

Plus: a bold choice of double bill from British Youth Opera that places too-heavy a burden on their young shoulders

Is this a Cathy Come Home for our times?

Plus: ‘Britain as Seen on ITV’ plunged us into the era when blokes with eccentric hobbies were a TV staple

Plus: a celebration of From Our Own Correspondent, 60 years old this year

The unclued lights, five of which are correctly numbered, are of a kind. Ignore one accent. Chambers does not include…

The word pyramid runs from CAN at 7A, then 35, 36, 30, 5, 2, 21D, 19 to CONSIDERATE at 1A.…

This tournament will be my last — and I’ll win it by imagining I’m fighting that slob

Just look for the huge pawprints, the seagull remains and the bear scat

The only true villages that exist anymore are in London

Editors, like publicans, apparently have some of the hardest jobs to automate. But the robots are probably coming for you

So now I wait, for terrible misfortune will surely befall those who have persecuted me

This has been the most shocking saga in the entire history of bridge. In the face of overwhelming evidence that…

My grandmaster colleague James Plaskett has two passions, the pursuit of the mythical giant octopus (ongoing) and a fascination with…

Black to play. This position is from Abramciuc–Nevednichy, Chisinau 2014. How can Black simplify down to a winning endgame? Answers…

In Competition No. 2916 you were invited to recast a well-known scene from literature to reflect the fact that its…

He’d have to stay in power for decades to carry it through – but the very idea is already causing damage

The benefits of forced experimentation quickly outweigh the temporary costs

Plus: How to bypass friends politely at a party; and a teacher’s apostrophe muddle

‘To every thing there is a season.’ But I still went to the Ton-Tons Macoute

An exciting discovery in the records of the County Court of Chester – but it’s probably not the oldest F-word