All pay rises for public servants to be frozen until after the pandemic is over! Shock horror! Hospitality industry unions…

As you know, the Spectator Australia Social Research Unit, operating behind heavily fortified premises in Canberra, has long been involved…

Everybody loves borders now What do Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Ardern, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the crazier fringe of the Greens party (here…

I began my self-quarantine last week, after returning from London, but it wasn’t until five days later that the symptoms…

China must be made to cough up for the coronavirus

Regurgitating Democrat smears now passes for ‘news’

Trump haters who sneer at a potential cure don’t have to take it

What really constitutes a war crime?

As our economy teeters, the communists are poised to strike. Instead make them pay

The universal cartoon is a rare thing

Second-home owners are not welcome in times of pandemic

Working from home has been on the rise for years. No one expected the latest surge to happen in the…

The fight against coronavirus has only just begun

Why does coronavirus affect the generations differently?

There is still plenty we don’t understand about the virus

In tough times, people often discover their dauntlessness

Time out When did British workers start being ‘furloughed’? The word furlough is first recorded in the English language in…

Covid questions Sir: I worry that Matt Ridley and others are trying to frighten us about Covid-19 (‘Like nothing we’ve…

Writers like me are used to long hours alone. I’ve never enjoyed that side of it. I don’t like the…

For days, the Prime Minister had been resisting the kind of measures which have placed many other countries into lockdown,…

Coronavirus Sunday dawned with 233 people in the United Kingdom dead thus far from the coronavirus Covid-19 (a week earlier…

The CBI’s guidelines on ‘best practice for business’ during the pandemic tell the 1,500 larger companies that make up the…

In the past ten days we have seen the greatest expansion of state power in British history. The state has…

Last summer, in the bc era, I took my then three-year-old to a new group play session: ‘Lottie’s Magic Box.’…

‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the…

Perhaps we are at least past the beginning of this crisis. The phase where the hunt for multipacks of loo-rolls…

‘Now I am cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in To saucy doubts and fears.’ Shakespeare got there first, as ever, and…

Good writing about celebrity is scant. It has few poets, because it takes depth to go truly shallow (I’d nominate…

Armageddon began as Har Megiddo, the Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. The theological aspect is Christian. For Jews, ancient…

‘It’s a woman’s thing, creation,’ says Sarah,a girl accused of witchcraft in 18th-century Scotland, in one of the three storylines…

Where to turn in anxious and febrile times? One answer is to nature, or the ‘non-human living world’, which, despite…

Alan Johnson describes how four young men from Liverpool revived Britain, healed America and brought joy to millions

Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…

At first glance, nostalgia does not seem like a subject much suited to exploration via the medium of the pop…

The French economist, statistician and polymath Thomas Piketty sprang to fame in 2013 with a daunting tome, Capital in the…

Here is a sobering thought for anyone involved in the world of finance. Those who charge interest when they lend…

If you seek out the home of an admired writer, you might find, as with Ernest Hemingway’s house in Havana,…

Late in his life, I asked my uncle René about his exploits in wartime France. What I knew was that…

This was not the ideal beach book for the Christmas holidays but now we are in different times, it has…

There was a basket of thick red wool and two pairs of large knitting needles at the start of University…

The film you want to see this week that you mightn’t have seen if you weren’t stuck at home is…

War and plague have menaced theatres before, but rarely on this scale, says Lloyd Evans

There’s a certain merit in bluntness. ‘Quarantine Soirées’ was what the Budapest Festival Orchestra called its response to the crisis,…

Kevin Katke was quite a man. He had no military training, no political background and no espionage experience. Nonetheless, his…

First shown on BBC Scotland, Harry Birrell Presents Films of Love and War (BBC4, Wednesday) was the documentary equivalent of…

This Provençal village clusters around the base of a cliff 300 feet high and a kilometre wide surmounted by two…

BIG, the solution at 21D, can be associated with the ten unclued lights. First prize Elizabeth Shorter, St Austell, CornwallRunners-up…

For the past 12 years, Roger Alton and I have shared this half page like Box and Cox: he writes…

Q. Our son and his girlfriend have announced their engagement and we are delighted with his choice. Our problem is…

In Competition No. 3141, you were invited to submit a song we cansing instead of ‘Happy Birthday’ during hand-washing. Congratulations…

‘Get me Heygates on the phone! I need that order of pony nuts now, damn it!’ It was like a…

Three weeks ago Amber Rudd travelled to Christ Church, Oxford, to speak to students about her experiences of being a…

It was impossible to imagine, when I filed my column a fortnight ago, that I would be writing this one…

A puzzle used in the solving championship, composed by Vittorio de Barbieri in 1918. White must give mate in two…

‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood…

I love eating while watching bad films like Battleship, so I love takeaway food from local restaurants. I am not…

Desperately boring times but very healthy ones. No parties, no girls, not too much boozing, lots of smoking and reading…

The unclued lights consist of one author, two titles and four characters; ignore one accent. The titles (three words and…

I could list all manner of things I don’t try, because I know I won’t like them, like skydiving and…