The Spectator
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
Keeping us in our place
Lockdowns are just the start of an era of rule by ‘experts’
We need genuinely ‘free and fair’ elections
At least Trump’s fraud allegations may clean up the system
Soviet states of Australia
Is our Commonwealth a collective or a set of competitive entities?
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
Robins
At the risk of sounding like Sid James in some late period Carry On, I currently have two birds on…
NHS Notebook
Across Europe, hospitals have been filling up again with the second wave of coronavirus. France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and the…
The Week
Comfort spending
Every country was blindsided by the pandemic; few governments responded to it by borrowing as much as Britain. The figures…
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
Home The AstraZeneca vaccine developed by the University of Oxford was found to be 70 per cent effective — 90…
Columnists
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
Last week, I wrote about ‘Frost & Lewis’ (David and Oliver), leaders of our country’s team at the Brexit negotiations,…
The public sector delusion
I wonder how much more money we will have to bung the teachers in order to inculcate within them an…
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…
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.…
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
Blame game
Ah, millennials. Golden children of the Digital Age or dysfunctional, over-educated slackers? Bit of both, says Anne Helen Petersen, although…
Jokes or gags?
Here are a couple of books that seek to tackle the difficult issue of comedy on the front line. One…
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
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,…
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…
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…
A Scottish Paradise
As every Italian schoolchild knows, The Divine Comedy opens in a supernatural dark wood just before sunrise on Good Friday…
Animal magic
J.K. Rowling has written a book for children — and you know what? It’s a charmer. The Ickabod(Hachette, £20) was…
Four disparate thinkers
How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram…
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
The Queen’s Gambit
As the Covid virus recedes even from Victoria – and the South Australian scare proves less serious than it looked…
Eryn Jean Norvill
Normality is returning, bit by bit, to public entertainment.Apparently fifty thousand people can go to a football match, yelling themselves…
Drama vs display
It is amazing what fine performances you can get beamed to your computer these days. Slightly less amazing is the…
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…
A salmagundi of tedium
The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The…
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…
Lloyd Evans
Sasha is angry. He’s a gay artist on his way to his niece’s birthday party and he keeps popping codeine…
Quite contrary
Frankly, it is rather hideous — but also quite wonderful, shimmering against the weak blue of a late November sky.…
‘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 / Language
Simon Collins Things must be getting back to normal again in Australia if we’re arguing about the wording of the…
2485: Triplets
The unclued lights (all but one either hyphened or of two words) share a distinctive feature. Across 1 Fun and…
Forbidden pairings
Put yourself in the shoes of Aryan Gholami, the teenage master from Iran who was paired with an Israeli opponent…
Ghosts of Christmas pissed
I feel like a prisoner, making daily marks on the cell wall to chart the approach of freedom. But will…
Robust
‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of…
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…
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…
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,…
To the city
In Competition No. 3176 you were invited to write a poem to a city. This challenge was inspired by both…
Puzzle no. 632
White to play and win. E. Pogosjants, Shakhmaty v SSSR 1976. Promoting the a-pawn allows Black a perpetual check. Which…











































































