The Spectator
26 September 2020 Aus
Australia
Say goodbye to freedom
If Victoria avoids becoming a Marxist failed state, it may very well be because of The Spectator Australia’s contributor Ian…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
Here at the Spectator Australia Biological Research Unit, together with our research partners at the Wuhan Bat, Rat and Snake…
Australian notes
18C on steroids The idea that a sitting Tasmanian senator can be dragged before the state Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for her…
China notes
Ducking Peking ASoviet-era joke had someone visiting the part of the commu- nist bureaucracy which issued permission to move your…
Australian Features
It’s not the virus killing our economy. It’s governments.
The billions borrowed will have to be repaid
The Vatican is far too cosy with Beijing
Why does the Pope not condemn China’s human rights abuses?
Features
Crowds
London, writes Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story, is ‘that great cesspool into which all the loungers and…
Letter from Madagascar
Earlier this month, in his weekly address to the nation, our President, the former DJ and coup leader Andry Rajoelina,…
The Week
Revenge of the snitch
If neighbours break whatever new Covid rules might soon emerge, it has been suggested that the Good Citizen might snitch…
Don’t arm Iran
Hard though it is to remember now, 2020 began with a very different dark cloud on the horizon. For a…
Portrait of the Week
Home Pubs and restaurants would have to close at ten o’clock, under new coronavirus restrictions announced by Boris Johnson, the…
Columnists
Who rules supreme?
Within hours of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Democrats and Republicans began fighting over how to fill her…
The police’s picky attitude to protests
I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du…
Covid has ended the rail franchise fiasco at last
Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of…
Time for me to be more assertive
In the light of recent articles in The Spectator, I think it is vital I should point out here and…
The Spectator’s Notes
The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic…
Books
A playwright at play
Tom Stoppard is a non-stop genius of jokes – but many of them make his latest biographer uneasy, says Craig Raine
The front line of hell
Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was…
Fish out of water
In the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans paint images of salmon on to stones. They say that if you rub those…
A novel sort of novel
Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens,…
Cooking up a storm
You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration…
In and out of the magic circle
Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell’s diaries for The Spectator, I concluded as follows: Who will be the chroniclers of…
Years in the wilderness
When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a…
Worth doing badly
The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m…
Arts
Stuck at home with a serial killer
It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…
The odd couple
Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…
Yusuf/Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman 2
Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…
Five-star blarney
The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to…
Dumb and dumber
I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about…
One for the road
The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…
Spirited away
The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne
Culture club
In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…
In defence of George Bernard Shaw
What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad.…
Life
Kiwi Life
What has happened to the West, ignoring the lessons of history? Sweden, for example, long regarded as one of the…
Some beliefs are more equal than others
Kristie Higgs, a 44-year-old school assistant, didn’t realise that criticising the sex education curriculum at her son’s school on Facebook…
Puzzle no. 623
White to play. Areshchenko–Koch, Bundesliga 2020. White has won rook for bishop, but the queen is offside and his Rf2…
When Garry met Fabi
Send in haste, repent at leisure. It is a cruel certainty that you will sooner or later text your intimate…
Lead alert
In Competition No. 3167 you were invited to submit a rhymed poem that is leadenly prosaic in tone and content.…
2476: Playtime
The ten unclued lights (one of two words and hyphened) consist of two themes which can be resolved into five…
Solution to 2473: May
The unclued lights, along with Peter MAY in the title, are England cricket captains. First prize Harry Hyman, Streatley, West…
A scene with Harry and Son
José Mourinho, it was surprising to read, recently said how relieved he was that the Amazon Prime cameras were out…
Soho: home of the brave
London is gasping — so where to go but Soho, which is so good at despair? It is often necrotic…
Herd immunity
‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the…
