The Spectator
Australia
What lies ahead
Well, here we go! Buckle yourselves in tightly because it’s going to be quite the ride. After nine years of…
Dis-Con notes
Watching results on Saturday night, my chief thought was less ‘Who’s going to win?’ than, rather, ‘Thank God that’s over.’…
Australian Features
Oops…. Did anybody do the Teals’ costings?
Economic analysis has been replaced by emotion
Features
Getting things mended
‘Sides to middle’, that’s the cry. When your foot goes through the flat sheet in the night, there’s only one…
Could Putin be toppled?
The former head of MI6 on where Russia has gone wrong – and what happens next
‘China is all-out against us’
Lithuania’s foreign minister on Ukraine, Taiwan and the principle of sovereignty
The Week
Johnson’s guilt
An ability to survive narrow scrapes has been one of Boris Johnson’s defining qualities. The pictures of Downing Street’s lockdown…
Soldiering on
Given Putin’s less than triumphant operation in Chechnya, where the Russian army suffered catastrophic losses, it is hardly surprising that…
Portrait of the week
Home Sue Gray starched and ironed her report for publication after the Metropolitan Police wound up its own enquiries into…
Columnists
Now for the hard bit
Boris Johnson has been plunged back into the mire of partygate. The publication of a photograph of Johnson raising a…
Airport officials are on a power trip
On my 2 p.m. arrival for a week-long work trip to South Africa a fortnight ago, an immigration agent flapped…
Along comes monkeypox
I hate to be one of those columnists who says ‘I told you so’. But I told you so. Looking…
The Spectator’s Notes
I wrote recently elsewhere about Jeremy Hunt’s good new book examining unnecessary deaths in the NHS. Someone should write a…
The attention deficit
I have just posted a score of 1,625,000 on Bubbleshooter, my best yet. Bubbleshooter is a game where you fire…
The good friend I never knew
I have just read an extraordinary new book. It’s by a close and old pal whom I’d count as one…
A moving experience from Paddington to Liverpool Street
It’s 8.16 on Tuesday morning and I’m actually writing this on a moving Elizabeth line train. Moving in the sense…
Books
Hockey sticks to diplomacy
If you want an inside view on the Trump White House, there could hardly be a better read than Joe…
Laughing in the face of adversity
Writing from a child’s point of view is a daredevil act that Miriam Toews raises the stakes on in her…
Brother against brother
‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and…
The real Norfolk
D.J. Taylor is a Norfolk native who, un-usually, has stayed put. These stories, written during the pandemic, are all set…
Duty vs pleasure
In this delightful sequel to her semi-autobiographical novel The Idiot (2017), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Elif…
Serious entertainment
What a weird lot crime writers are. I don’t come to this conclusion lightly, since I’m a crime writer myself,…
Rock till you drop
What do the following individuals have in common: a political activist from Suffolk; a chartered psychologist from Oxfordshire, who enjoys…
Cleopatra on the warpath
These Bodies of Water begins dramatically (as befits a book derived from Sabrina Mahfouz’s Royal Court show A History of…
Ballet’s lonely pioneer
Bronislava Nijinska was constantly undermined in her lifetime – most cruelly by her brother, says Sarah Crompton
Arts
Wizardly wham-bam
It’s an extraordinary thing in its way to revisit Harry Potter and the Cursed Child three years after its triumphant…
Northern exposure
When Nikolaus Pevsner dedicated his 1955 Reith Lectures to ‘The Englishness of English Art’, he left out the Scots. The…
Great Dane
Borgen star Sidse Babett Knudsen talks to Jasper Rees about why, after a break of ten years, the implausibly more-ish series is returning for a fourth season
Rotten Apples
Having now watched it to the end, I would say that Slow Horses (Apple TV+) is by far the best…
Tango traduced
Rambert ages elegantly: it might just rank as the world’s oldest company devoted to modern dance (whatever that term might…
Absolute beginner
The House of Shades is a state-of-the nation play that covers the past six decades of grinding poverty in Nottingham.…
A gigantic field of feeling
I was never into the blues that much. I listened to a bit of Roy Buchanan and Rory Gallagher but…
Lilacs out of the dead land
April is the cruellest month, but May is shaping up quite pleasantly and the daylight streamed in through the east…
Playing chicken with your conscience
Jade Goody appeared on Big Brother in 2002. She was a short, loud, blonde-haired woman who broadcast her every thought…
Cruise control
Top Gun is back, nearly 40 years after the original, with reprised roles for Tom Cruise (59) and Val Kilmer…
Life
Aussie life
I’m starting this column on the eve of the election, so you have me at a disadvantage. But not much…
Language
News reports tell us there has been a small furore over a list of ‘derogatory and offensive terms’ included in…
Tiger bites man
Viswanathan Anand left the spectators in awe at the Superbet Rapid earlier this month. The ‘Tiger of Madras’, as he…
Solution to 2554: Going, going…
The unclued lights were all extinct species. PTERODON was an acceptable variation at 5 Across. DODO was to be deleted…
2557: Heroes
Clockwise round the grid from a point to be determined run the names of four knights (2,5,5,5,5,8,5,3) followed by what…
On the money
In Competition No. 3250, you were invited to submit a sonnet to Mammon. It was ‘Epigram for Wall Street’, attributed…
Puzzle No. 704
Black to play. Bacrot-Anand, Bastia Rapid 2001. A spectacular blow from Anand prompted Bacrot to resign. What did he play?…
Don’t mess with my Neighbourhood Watch
‘Apocalyptic’ food shortages, gas and electricity bills soaring, wages not keeping pace with inflation… it’s beginning to look like we’re…
Dear Mary: Your problems solved
Q. My wife’s father, who she adored, has died and she is to be his sole beneficiary. She intends to…
On the same page
In the West End of London there is an alley which insinuates its way between the Charing Cross Road and…
End of the road
When my daughters learned to drive, I suggested they take their tests in automatics as driving manual cars would soon…
Mind your language: Stations
In Kyiv they have voted to changethe names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes…










































































