‘Crack down on welfare rorters. Get tough on radical Islam.’ If there’s a whiteboard in the Prime Minister’s office (or…

It was one of the Prime Minister’s best speeches. He was clear, eloquent and convincing. Clear about the terrorist threats…

Iron Ore’s Vale of Tears

‘At a certain point, you go, there’s a human-being here and you would think this must be incredibly bruising.’ Greg…

Was it really all that wise for the conservative commentariat to hound Tony Abbott?

A recent conviction in the ACT makes rapists of us all

With good old fashioned butter being rehabilitated in the eyes of the ‘experts’, what’s next?

The Fair Work Commission cries out for reform

Scotland’s political earthquake isn’t over, and the rest of the UK doesn’t yet understand the consequences

These incredibly brave people are risking their lives for the freedom not to believe. They deserve better from us

We’re destroying green belts and despoiling villages for the sake of a moral crusade based on developers’ propaganda

From the State of the Union address to the marine’s salute as the president leaves his helicopter, we like nothing better than creating complicated little rituals

According to Radio 4, wood-burning stoves are a mark of wordly success. Mine is reducing me to a cold, tired, red-eyed wreck

If you’re grateful not to be in the euro, it’s James Goldsmith and his ‘rebel army’ you should thank

Turkey's Turquoise Coast is beautiful, fertile and relatively unspoilt

Had the public been asked, before Monday morning, to identify two MPs who stood for honesty and decency, the names…

Home Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign secretary, resigned as chairman of Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee and promised…

Plus: a tip-off that could have sparked a bank run, and who won in Syriza’s standoff

Plus: Benefit increases; alcohol bans on trains; and cold calling

Modern politicians only really engage with each other behind closed doors

From The Spectator, 27 February 1915: Observers of birds have been much interested by the evidence, which seems to be fairly…

Bad behaviour Sir: A good number of years ago I was at the University of NSW with a pleasant fellow…

With each party uncompetitive in large parts of the country, expect a regionalised campaign in which leaders talk past one another

The stupidly PC actor has put his foot in it and is being called a racist by the moronsphere

Isis may seem like bullies to us, but in the skewed light of a smartphone they appear as underdogs, a revolutionary brave brigade taking on the big bad West

Some things are Aldi. Other things are Lush. I’m Aldi all the way

Plus: The lessons of Nick Leeson and a salute to Sir Robert Wade-Gery

In a review of Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane Adam Nicolson reminds us that the most poetic descriptions of nature were once the everyday speech of ordinary countrymen

Alexander Masters finds a great mathematician’s ‘popular’ book impenetrable from page four

Tracey Thorn is surprised that Kim Gordon, once the embodiment of cool, should be sounding off so publicly about her husband’s infidelity

James Walton, reviewing The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro finds it more admirable than enjoyable

A review of Reading the World by Ann Morgan finds a year-long blog also makes a brilliant, unlikely book

A review of Michael Arditti’s Widows and Orphans suggests that we are all waifs and strays now in our broken society

A review of the Lost Imperialist by Andrew Gailey wonders how Queen Victoria’s distinguished proconsul, who met everyone from Sitting Bull to Bismarck, could have slipped so far into oblivion

Will Self,  reviewing Nicholas Carr’s The Glass Cage, predicts the inexorable rise of the computer in a defiantly soulless society

Stephen Bayley announces the launch of The Spectator’s inaugural What’s That Thing? Award for the worst piece of public art of 2015

In his overconsumption of food, money and clothes, the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll showed the way, as a new exhibition of Elvisiana at the O2 proves

Plus: Salt and Silver, also at Tate Britain, is an exhibition that proves that some of the earliest photographs ever taken were the best

Mark Hudson travels to St Petersburg to see how the nihilism of Bacon goes down in Russia

Plus: Hinterland - an ethereal, dreamy, innovative, coming-of-age tale that only cost £10,000 to make

Plus: a much-needed corrective to paedophile hysteria in How I Learned to Drive at the Southwark Playhouse

Plus: tin-ear Flamenco from Sadler’s Wells and deft circus choreography from Cirkopolis

Both the music and stage direction are powerfully realised in this Puccini / de Falla double bill

Peter Phillips doesn’t care how people come across Tallis’s mathematical masterpiece ‘Spem in alium’ as long as they do

Plus: a heretical documentary about trains on BBC4 and a dazzling new sitcom from Channel 4 that makes it embarrassingly hard to avoid the words ‘instant’ and ‘classic’

Don't always believe the phrase 'We have something special for you'. But also beware of that some podcasts will temporarily blind you – by making you cry

Adelaide is the perfect festival city and its once biennial, now annual, Festival has been the pace setter for others…

Varoufakis is a third-rate academic posing as Mussonlini — and I apologise to il Duce’s memory

Farewell to the great hare-coursing slipper Garrett ‘Garry’ Kelly

Me exercising my legal rights made it want to lock its doors and hammer large pieces of crooked wood over its windows

So perhaps we would all be happier if we could just stop worrying about what class everyone belongs

Bridge players never get bored of each other’s company for one simple reason: interesting hands are like juicy bits of…

The elite tournament at Zurich, which finished last week, has adopted a system for determining the ultimate trophy winner which…

White to play. This position is from Nakamura-Karjakin, Zurich classic 2015. White’s knight seems trapped but he can rescue it…

In Competition No. 2886 you were invited to submit a Pepys’-eye view of modern life. Pepys’s candid and minutely observed…

The unclued Down lights (individually or as a pair) are of a kind in short, as are the unclued Across…

The unclued lights are some of the words highlighted in Chambers 2011 which were unfortunately omitted from the 2014 edition…

We’re in danger of turning Parliament back into a rich man’s pastime

Otherwise you end up with the same boring bastards every time

Plus: How to deal with drunken texting and low beams

Had he made it to president, history would have been different – and better

What to do about one of the most overused words in today’s media