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The Spectator

28 May 2016 Aus

Attack of the transgender Marxists

The Safe Schools agenda is designed to bring down the traditional pillars of Australian society

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Unenchanted

For the first time in living memory, many conservative Australians are unenchanted by the choices facing them at the ballot…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

No-one should have been surprised when Greens Senator Richard Di Natale was sprung last week for paying his three employees…

Australian Notes

Australian notes

I dropped in the other day to the Sydney Writers’ Festival to hear Stan Grant deliver his autobiographical and sometimes…

Consider This

Consider this…

Colin Dillon – Straight shooter   In times of shrill complaint, it is worth contemplating the life and career of…

Diary Australia

Australian diary

April 2012. News Limited newshound Steve Lewis and I are hustling to a meeting at the ABC’s headquarters in Ultimo.…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Das Politikal Korrectness

How neo-Marxists are taking over our institutions

Features Australia

And if we lose…?

Turnbull & Co. will have only one choice if they fail to secure outright victory

Features Australia

Business/Robbery etc

Those who criticise Morrison’s super reforms are ill-informed (including this magazine)

Features Australia

Attack of the transgender Marxists

The Safe Schools agenda is designed to bring down the traditional pillars of Australian society

Features

Features

Brexit, and the return of political lying

In their EU campaign, the Chancellor and Prime Minister have put dirty tricks back at the heart of government

Features

Junk Bond

After six decades, and several writers better than Ian Fleming, this character is simply worn out

Features

Hollande’s hollow crown

The French president is looking more hopeless than ever. But he has good reason to be plotting a run for re-election

Features

Dating stinks

For the increasing number of single women in their thirties, any dating idea can seem worth trying, no matter how bizarre

Features

The power trap

Having influence in a powerful European Union means giving it much more power over us

Features

Northern overexposure

Mancunians used to laugh at the chippy folk in Liverpool. Now they match them for self-congratulation

A kind of posthumous existence: a death mask of Keats, sold at auction for £16,100 in 1996

Notes on...

The Romantic poets

There has never been a better time to make the pilgrimage to Keats’s grave

The Week

Leading article

Losing faith

The decline in religious belief has become precipitous in recent years

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home The government published a Treasury analysis warning that an exit from the EU would plunge Britain into a year-long…

Diary

Diary

Also in her diary: Doctor difficulties, Liverpool’s grands projets, Kenneth Baker’s brainchild, further adventures with bats

Barometer

Barometer

Also in our Barometer column: children in care, football managers and mountain-climbing vegans

Ancient and modern

Plutarch and the EU

Plutarch’s advice to Greek rulers suggests he would understand today’s politics to a T

From The Archives

The dogs of peace

A modest proposal on food economy from 100 years ago

Letters

Australian letters

Not gay Sir: Ian Thompson in his review of Freedman’s book “ The Murderous History of Biblical Translations …” (Spectator…

Columnists

World Politics

This referendum has shown us the real Cameron

Freed from normal election constraints, senior politicians are revealing what truly motives them

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s notes

Also in The Spectator’s Notes: The EEA, the memoirs of Algy Cluff, and whatever happened to Tory modernisation?

Rod Liddle

Voters have no time for the flaccid centre

Norbert Hofer, Alexander Van der Bellen, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are all part of the same phenomenon

Matthew Parris

If I were in charge of Leave, here’s what I’d say…

Unless the Brexit campaign can capture something of the St Crispin’s Day spirit, it has no chance

Hugo Rifkind

My six months of madness

We’re finally stopping giving our soldiers Lariam. Thank goodness for that

Any other business

Warning: top-performing funds are highly likely to contain tobacco

Also in Any Other Business: the return of the Greek crisis; the mystery of Noreena Hertz

Books

Lead book review

Principles of heredity

We need a readable, authoritative popular guide to the latest developments in genetics. This, sadly, isn't it

Books

The elegiac and the exuberant

The master of precision and the ebullient fabulist — though very different writers — are highly recommended reading

Books

Great halls, last balls

Adrian Tinniswood vividly captures the last days of gracious living in his jaunty history,The Long Weekend

Books

Why Juan Villoro is the best football writer you’ve never heard of

Juan Villoro, Mexico’s foremost man of letters, captures the beautiful game to perfection

Books

There’s no escape

There’s no escape for Patricia Highsmith even in rural Suffolk, in Jill Dawson’s fictionalised vignette of the troubled novelist

Books

The great monkey puzzle

Chris Herzfeld’s account of the orangutan Wattana, in need of constant mental stimulation, suggests that primates are really just like us

Books

Lost in a time capsule

Charlotte Hobson’s promising debut novel explores the Russian avant-garde scene through the eyes of an English governess on the eve of the first world war

Books

One club, no hearts

In a highly distinctive memoir, Betsy Lerner affectionately skewers her mother’s bridge-playing friends — with their impeccable reserve and luncheons of silvery fish

Books

Shakespeare’s crowning glory

There’s only one true version of King Lear, says Sir Brian Vickers — and any Shakespeare scholar who disagrees can go hang

Books

On Moses’s mountain

In his engrossing history of travellers to Mount Sinai, George Manginis describes the 19th-century theft of the priceless Codex Sinaiticus by Constantine Tischendorf

Books

An Oxford treasure trove

Oxford’s reverence for the Classics over the centuries is brilliantly celebrated by L.W.B Brockliss — who also imagines a glorious virtual future for the university

Books

Last laughs

Stibbe’s teenage heroine tries to make sense of the eccentric inmates and a mountain of unpaid bills at Paradise Lodge

Books

Burning passions

In 1988, Bradford Muslims didn’t apparently manage to incinerate Rushdie’s book — symbolic, says Kenneth Baker, of the endurance of the written word

Arts

True or false? The Temple of Bel, Palmyra, before and after its destruction at the hands of Islamic State

Arts feature

The great pretenders

In an age of advanced technologies, copying might not be a deviant variant, but the essential thing. But does that mean the beauty of Palmyra can be reproduced by robots?

Doing it for themselves: the first issue of the first punk fanzine ‘Sniffin’ Glue’

Exhibitions

Punk turns 40

‘Would Malcolm be turning in his grave? Would he hell!’

Opera

Myth-making

The music lacks memorability, the staging evokes a sigh and the performances are mildly uneven – but I wasn’t bored for a moment

Theatre

Mind games

Plus: a quirky, engaging, affectionate portrait of David Baddel’s mum and dad at the Menier Chocolate Factory

Architecture

Giving Tate Modern a lift

The new ten-storey Switch House is a strange object with an exposed-concrete interior, some promisingly large new galleries and an optimum belvedere

Cinema

Jane Austen on speed

Because he’s utterly wrong about Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan – and this delicious film adaptation, Love & Friendship, by Whit Stillman proves it

Television

Counting on sheep

Jo Brand and Omid Djalili (of BBC4’s anti-austerity comedy Going Forward) should try watching Addicted to Sheep, which is so politically incorrect I’m surprised it hasn’t got an 18 certificate

Radio

Baby love

Plus: Jane Goodall makes the ideal guest on Radio 3’s Private Passions with her undemanding music choices and chimp tales

The Heckler

Royal Court Theatre

The sixty-year-old institution has a large reputation built on minuscule achievements

Culture Buff

Eoin Andersen

Zurich’s loss was Melbourne’s gain in 2015 when Eoin Andersen became Concertmaster of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. Having begun violin…

Life

Competition

Drinking partner

In Competition No. 2949 you were invited to submit a poem about sharing a drink with a famous writer. I…

High life

High life

It was fun in the 1950s but nowadays it’s nothing but sleaze and selling

Low life

Low life

Depending on the result of my recent blood test, my oncologist may halt my cancer hormone treatment

Real life

Real life

What with rows with neighbours and people going bump in the night – I’m not cut out for Airbnb

Long life

Long life

A knife? I didn’t know what a knife was. I’d never heard of such a thing

The turf

Numbers game

The beginning of the season is always tricky for punters, but there are helpful indicators if you know where to look

Bridge

Bridge

If you live in (or anywhere near) London, and you enjoy a good teams tournament, you could do no better…

Chess

Garry’s comeback

To great surprise, the former world champion Garry Kasparov staged a brief comeback when he participated in a blitz tournament…

Chess puzzle

No. 410

Black to play. This position is from So-Nakamura, Ultimate Blitz Challenge, Saint Louis 2016. How did Black make a key…

Crossword

2262: Numbers game

The unclued Across lights are of one linguistic kind and the unclued Down lights are of another, all of which…

Crossword solution

To 2259: Eco

The unclued lights can be preceded by GREEN which had to be shaded in green, as indicated in the solution…

Status anxiety

The only Eurosceptic in the room

At Sciences Po in Paris, I was listened to with polite amusement, but almost no one took the threat of Brexit seriously

Spectator sport

A blueprint for English cricket

Fewer Tests, conferences for the counties, and inter-city T20s full of razzle-dazzle

Dear Mary

Your problems solved

Plus: coming up against wedding guests’ chronic flakiness; the man who stayed too long

Food

Cool and underground

But the Keeper’s House is nonetheless my kind of place

Mind your language

Concept

I thought this one was dead. It’s alive and infesting trade magazines