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The Spectator

28 November 2020 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Pillars tremble

At what point do conservatives within the Morrison government say ‘enough is enough’? The ever-leftwards drift of the party once…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Welcome to Boola Bardip

Buddy, can you spare me a lazy twenty million?

Features Australia

So how’s ScoMo faring?

Better than Turnbull (but just)

Features Australia

Keeping us in our place

Lockdowns are just the start of an era of rule by ‘experts’

Features Australia

We need genuinely ‘free and fair’ elections

At least Trump’s fraud allegations may clean up the system

Features Australia

Bordering on the insane

The premiers have trashed our Constitution

Features Australia

Soviet states of Australia

Is our Commonwealth a collective or a set of competitive entities?

Features Australia

Business/Robbery etc.

Menzies’ home ownership or Keating’s super? Home ownership or superannuation? For an increasing proportion of Australians, it’s one or the…

Features Australia

Never surrender

Yes, it was a landslide:Trump’s

Features

Features

Left behind

How Labour betrayed its base

Features

The aftermath

How can Britain recover post-Covid?

Notes on...

Robins

At the risk of sounding like Sid James in some late period Carry On, I currently have two birds on…

Notebook

NHS Notebook

Across Europe, hospitals have been filling up again with the second wave of coronavirus. France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the…

Features

Give it a shot

How to win over vaccine sceptics

Features

Sets appeal

The distracting beauty of TV backdrops

Features

Open season

Anything goes with Advent calendars

Features

Bad tidings

I was dreaming of a cancelled Christmas

The Week

Diary

Diary

I’m often asked when I’ll write a pandemic novel. I’m not sure I’d ever be tempted, though the backdrop of…

Leading article

Comfort spending

Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures…

Barometer

Barometer

Gloss over Should we be worried that the head of research into respiratory drugs at AstraZeneca is called Dr Pangalos,…

Ancient and modern

Classic examples

To what use does one put history? Romans thought it provided ‘lessons’. Modern historians rather sniff at the idea, but…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home The AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the University of Oxford was found to be 70 per cent effective — 90…

Letters

Letters

SNP sophistry Sir: Andrew Wilson (‘Scot free’, 21 November) poses the question: ‘What if the case for independence was a…

Columnists

Any other business

Pension funds need a push to invest in the green revolution

We’ve heard a lot this week about infrastructure spending, and how much more will be needed if the UK is…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

Last week, I wrote about ‘Frost & Lewis’ (David and Oliver), leaders of our country’s team at the Brexit negotiations,…

Columns

The public sector delusion

I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an…

Columns

We need a dose of vaccine realism

One of my geniuses as both a commentator and a character is to confront what for most normal people amounts…

Columns

The soggification of the Liberal Democrats

I was never afraid of Jeremy Corbyn, never afraid of Momentum. I’ve never really feared Britain’s hard left at all.…

Columns

Here comes President Joebama

‘So you’re seeing a team develop that I have great confidence in,’ said former president Barack Obama this week when…

Books

Australian Books

Blame game

Ah, millennials. Golden children of the Digital Age or dysfunctional, over-educated slackers? Bit of both, says Anne Helen Petersen, although…

More from Books

Jokes or gags?

Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One…

Lead book review

A study in realpolitik

Barack Obama was famous for his rhetoric, but his achievements show just what a steely political operator he was too, says Sam Leith

More from Books

Man of mystic sorrow

John Steinbeck didn’t believe in God — but he didn’t believe much in humanity either. When push came to shove,…

More from Books

The power of the pamphlet

Researching the seditious literature of earlier periods is seldom suspenseful, pulse-quickening work. For every thrill of archival discovery, there are…

More from Books

Anything but a quiet life

Kikuko Tsumura is a multi-prizewinning Japanese author whose mischievously deceptive new novel takes us into what purports to be the…

More from Books

A Scottish Paradise

As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday…

More from Books

Animal magic

J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod(Hachette, £20) was…

More from Books

Four disparate thinkers

How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram…

More from Books

Poet on the brink

‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the…

Arts

Australian Arts

The Queen’s Gambit

As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…

Culture Buff

Eryn Jean Norvill

Normality is returning, bit by bit, to public entertainment.Apparently fifty thousand people can go to a football match, yelling themselves…

Classical

Drama vs display

It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…

Television

Drama gold or bullion dross?

Unlike with every other BBC period drama series these days, I didn’t have to sit through Small Axe: Mangrove grumbling…

Radio

A salmagundi of tedium

The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The…

Film

It’ll blow you away

When I recommend this documentary to people, telling them it follows the journalistic investigation into a fire that broke out…

Theatre

Lloyd Evans

Sasha is angry. He’s a gay artist on his way to his niece’s birthday party and he keeps popping codeine…

More from Arts

Quite contrary

Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky.…

Arts feature

‘It was like a survivors’ circle’

Michael Hann talks to Corey Taylor, front man of ‘the most revolting band in the world’, about PTSD, Donald Trump and life after alcoholism

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life / Language

Simon Collins Things must be getting back to normal again in Australia if we’re arguing about the wording of the…

Crossword

2485: Triplets

The unclued lights (all but one either hyphened or of two words) share a distinctive feature. Across 1 Fun and…

Chess

Forbidden pairings

Put yourself in the shoes of Aryan Gholami, the teenage master from Iran who was paired with an Israeli opponent…

The turf

The turf

Why hasn’t Bristol De Mai become as beloved by the racing public as his fellow greys Desert Orchid and One…

High life

High life

New York There are times, living in this here dump, when I doubt if anyone’s heard of the word magnanimity.…

Drink

Ghosts of Christmas pissed

I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will…

Mind your language

Robust

‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of…

The Wiki Man

Meal kits have changed my life

Ford’s Kumar Galhotra once remarked that carmaking is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision. You spend five…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. For many years my boss gave each member of his small team a very generous Christmas gift voucher from…

No sacred cows

A shed of one’s own

I’ve moved out of my home. No, Caroline and I haven’t broken up. It’s just that we’re having the house…

Crossword solution

to 2482: Perm all five

The unclued lights each contain all five vowels once only, but in different orders. First prize Dr Stephen Clarkson, Hadleigh,…

Competition

To the city

In Competition No. 3176 you were invited to write a poem to a city. This challenge was inspired by both…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 632

White to play and win. E. Pogosjants, Shakhmaty v SSSR 1976. Promoting the a-pawn allows Black a perpetual check. Which…

Low life

Low life

I regained consciousness on a trolley in a recovery ward. A masked porter wheeled me from there back to my…

Real life

Real life

Pretty Man was a plump white pony in the forefront of a sad picture. The photograph showed the seizure by…

Bridge

Bridge

Each November, Paula Leslie organises the Young Chelsea Women’s Teams — a fantastic event, attracting many of Europe’s best players…