The Spectator
Australia
Ditch Paris
It was announced last week that the Minerals Council of Australia has ‘committed to cutting carbon emissions’ and has ‘thrown…
Australian Columnists
Australian notes
Time to cancel cancel culture If I were ever asked, and I won’t be, I would urge the government to…
Australian Features
Brown on white guilt
I can’t sleep because of the guilt. I have not been able to do so since I was 16. That…
Into the Intersectional abyss
Thanks to identity politics, the mob can never be satisfied
Lawless Labor easy meat
Victoria’s Libs should be able to trounce the Andrews government. But will they?
Business/Robbery etc.
Fake news on super’s early access spend The attention-grabbing media headline ‘Revealed: Aussies spend early access super on gambling, beauty…
Sleepless in Seattle until CHOP gets the chop
Black Marxists matter to the Democrats
Australian arts
It’s all about the money honey. When I awoke to see the front cover of the Weekend Australian’s Review Section…
Black-robed guardians
We are increasingly ruled by unelected and unaccountable judges
Features
Football without fans
Football is back — but the fans aren’t. Covid means that clubs have to play their games behind closed doors.…
The Week
Portrait of the week
Home Pubs in England would be allowed to reopen for table service from 4 July, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister,…
Britain emerges, blinking
The Prime Minister’s announcement that pubs, restaurants and many other facilities will be able to re-open on 4 July amounts…
Assuming liability
When Covid-19 first appeared, its similarity to Sars made some assume it could not mount a pandemic; others that it…
Columnists
Will Covid change anything?
Earlier this month, a curious report caught my attention. Apparently there exists no rigorously established evidence that electric shock therapy,…
Why Biden might be better for Brexit Britain
At the best of times, US presidential elections require the British government to walk a tightrope. In 1992, a Tory…
A VAT cut won’t boost spending if we don’t trust this government
Should Chancellor Rishi Sunak cut VAT as an emergency stimulus to the consumer economy? When Labour’s Alistair Darling made a…
The Spectator’s Notes
‘White Lives Matter Burnley’ said the plane’s banner as it circled the club’s stadium just after the teams had ‘taken…
Political pandering won’t prevent Covid deaths
When the media have gone large on the conclusions of an overpoweringly tedious report, one of the biggest favours a…
Books
Next year in Jerusalem
Alex Ryvchin’s book couldn’t possibly have come at a better time. On an almost daily basis, voices opposed to the…
Time immemorial
Some books elucidate their subject, mapping and sharpening its boundaries. The Clock Mirage, by the mathematician Joseph Mazur, is not…
Trapped in hell
On the morning of 10 March 1920, on the edge of the city of Pachuca in central Mexico, 87 miners…
Everyday exchanges
Conversation is a fascinating subject, says Philip Hensher – but very few people get it right
One who got away
In 1694 London’s streets echoed with a call to the piratical life: Come all you brave boys, whose courage is…
The road to Weimar
Has it ever occurred to you that the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 might have won us the war? Until…
The lives of others
Strange, when your own life flatlines, the way in which other lives become suddenly more interesting. I have been retreating…
Giving the game away
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a…
A troubled past
A decade ago — eheu fugaces labuntur anni — Stuart Evers’s debut story collection, Ten Stories About Smoking, was one…
Brains and beauty
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless…
Arts
Keith Urban using a Maton guitar, recording Gimme Shelter in Olympic Studios, London
We are critical of ourselves for not designing or manufacturing things any more. Well, there is a contrary example in…
New word order
I was going to write about Monument Valley, and I suppose I will eventually, but first I have to write…
Beige-washed Burton
The BBC has been having a good pandemic. Stuck at home, a generation raised on podcasts and YouTube has discovered…
Homage to Avalonia
Televising Glastonbury has changed the festival, and in turn transformed television, says Graeme Thomson
Age of stuckism
I’m in Mayfair and I’m boarding an airplane. Or rather, I’m boarding an approximation of an airplane. In the centre…
Nearly nul points
This comedy stars Will Ferrell and Rachel McAdams as an Icelandic duo whose biggest dream is to represent their country…
Eroticism and ecstasy
Wayne McGregor’s Morgen! and Frederick Ashton’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits are the first pieces of live dance — streamed…
Chekhov by Zoom
The Beeb has released Simon Godwin’s Hamlet staged by the RSC in 2016. The director makes one major change and…
Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways
Grade: A ‘Rough’ in terms of the mostly spoken vocals, but only ‘rowdy’ if you’re approaching your 80th birthday, which…
Pure poison
The big mistake people make with Alan Bennett is to conflate him with his fellow Yorkshireman David Hockney. But whereas…
Life
Aussie Life
Everyone wants to get high and have sex while saving money. So says P. J. O’Rourke, the political satirist who…
Peaty giant, Tuscan flower
The virus is in retreat, the lock-down is crumbling, the sherbet dispensaries will shortly reopen and there is a second…
Who watches the watchdog?
At the beginning of April, I became so frustrated by the supine coverage of the government’s response to the coronavirus…
Ventriloquising
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Network failures
You can’t discuss racial inequality without using the N-word. And you can’t debate social justice without adding the C-word and…
Here comes the summer
In Competition No. 3154 you were invited to supply your own variations on the medieval round ‘Sumer is icumen in’.…
Solution to 2460: Sleaze
The word is TACK. In the order of the headwords in Chambers, except for the fifth, their meanings are indicated…
Clutch fun
‘May the best scoring system win!’ is hardly a sentiment to stoke the passions. In the 2011 referendum, the alternative…
2463: Tongue twister
The unclued lights are of a kind and are entered in the grid in a thematically appropriate manner. Across 11…
Puzzle no. 610
White to play. Grischuk–Aronian, Clutch Chess 2020. Only one rook move draws here. Which one? Answers should be emailed to…












































































