All around us, we are seeing the cultural lights of Western civilisation flickering, if not being dimmed or even switched…

In a couple of weeks we’ll know whether the last 5 million votes in the same-sex marriage postal survey confirmed…

Four pillars of the Museum   Bob, my husband of more than half a century, was born in Tsing Tao,…

I hope one of my children studies law so at least he or she can read about me in Constitutional…

The mathematical, reading and science skills of Australian school students are in serious decline with the average student now close…

While it is said that a really bad idea never quite goes away, we could surely try to make multiculturalism…

Imagine ordering a population to evacuate from the path of a hurricane if they only had electric cars to drive.…

You don’t need a crystal ball to tell you that the next costly national distraction after the gay marriage circus…

In 440 BC, the Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus broke with tradition by collecting primary sources and then systematically and…

But just how diverse and inclusive were the Aztecs?

Our histrionic parenting is making today’s young people mad, unhappy and fat

We all know about helicopter parents and how terrible they can be. In New York, where I live, a mother…

Recall the media coverage at the height of the Jimmy Savile scandal, times it by about a thousand, and you…

It only dawned on me in late summer just how terrible our new benefits system, universal credit, might be both…

I became aware that there was real destitution in modern Britain five years ago. Destitution, as I see it, arises…

My sainted mum was of untarnished working-class blood — she worked, variously, as a cleaner, factory hand and shop assistant…

How to sum up David Frost? The lazy writer’s friend, aka Wikipedia, calls him ‘an English journalist, comedian, writer, media…

This season, as London fashion week was starting, Vogue posted a video following the new model of the moment Kaia…

I have come to Greece in search of sanity over Brexit. Ostensibly it is a symposium to discuss relations between…

Autumn is upon us, and the streets are full of families in fancy dress. People of all ages are dressing…

It was always going to be difficult for Theresa May’s government to secure a legacy beyond Brexit. With the negotiations…

Home Of perhaps 400 Britons returned from the former territory of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, those who…

To ITV’s London headquarters at the ungodly hour of 3.30 a.m. Piers Morgan is sunning himself in Beverly Hills and I’m…

Meeting halfway Sir: If our Brexit negotiator David Davis has not read Robert Tombs’s wonderful article ‘Lost in translation’ (21…

Littler Hitlers Cabinet secretary Damian Green appealed to commentators to halt the ‘ridiculous rise of routine comparisons to Hitler’. A…

Students eager to pull down statues and silence debate on topics of which they disapprove — and vice-chancellors who pusillanimously…

Theresa May’s style of negotiating with the European Union is coming spookily to resemble David Cameron’s. She is in the…

Another week, another blue-chip in the dock. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has brought fraud charges against London-based mining…

Sometimes in life the biggest risk you can take is to play it safe. This is the predicament of Philip…

The Japanese take a near-obsessive delight in washing, particularly in natural thermal baths

‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their…

Children started knocking on my door last month wearing Donald Trump face masks and asking for money. Indeed, one enterprising…

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…

Set partly in a future surveillance society, partly in ancient Carthage and 1970s Ethiopia, partly in contemporary Greece and London…

Joan Leigh Fermor died in 2003, aged 91, after falling in her bathroom in the house on a rocky headland…

Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the…

I’m not a critic, I’m an enthusiast. And when you are an enthusiast you need to try your best to…

This book is an exercise in crying wolf that utterly fails to prove its main thesis: that Europe is abandoning…

Suffering, wrote Auden, takes place ‘while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along’. His…

There was a time when biologists so scorned the attribution of human qualities to other animals that anthropomorphism was seen…

Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…

Why would a writer like Marcel Proust, who quivered and wheezed at the slightest sensation, decide to live surrounded by…

It’s hard to admire communist art with an entirely clear conscience. The centenary of the October revolution, which falls this…

Ballet would have been an obvious revenue stream for Sadler’s Wells when it reopened back in 1998 but straight-up classics…

I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…

In the first scene of this distinctly odd documentary, Grace Jones meets a group of fans, who squeal with delight…

Even in a Trump world where reality is what you say it is, the London Symphony Orchestra’s announcement of a…

Luigi Cherubini is the pantomime villain of French romantic music. As head of the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s he…

Madame Monet was bored. Wouldn’t you have been? Exiled to London in the bad, cold winter of 1870–71. In rented…

Beginning starts at the end. A Crouch End party has just finished and the sitting room is a waste tip…

Only Neil MacGregor could do it — take us in a single thread from a blackened copper coin, about the…

The opening of Gunpowder (BBC1, Saturdays) was just about the most knuckle-gnawingly tense ten minutes I’ve ever seen on TV.…

The Enlightenment saw orthodoxies challenged and the emergence of radical ideas throughout the latter half of the 18th century. That…

In the 1880s the young Max Klinger made a series of etchings detailing the surreal adventures of a woman’s glove…

Part canvas, part sandwich board, club kits don’t always work – but their designs can be addictive

I hate to say this, but the quality of life in the Bagel has crashed in a Harvey Weinstein-like way.…

Last May we had dinner with a comic who reads a lot and his wife. At one point, he told…

The Albanian builders have started a turf war in my kitchen. The hostilities broke out suddenly. One minute the builders…

Racing’s finances depend on as many people as possible betting, so it seemed a touch ironic that Responsible Gambling Awareness…

When I started playing bridge in earnest, the first tournament I entered was the EBU’s Autumn Congress, which back then…

Books on the world championship matches used to appear regularly, with some having multiple written accounts. In recent years, though,…

Black to play. This position is from Arda-Melia, Antalya 2017. How can Black win? Answers to me at The Spectator…

In Competition No. 3021 you were invited to compose terrifying lullabies. Lorca wondered why ‘Spain reserved the most potent songs…

One unclued light is a three-word phrase indicating the way in which each of the answers to clues in italics…

The poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ (originally ‘XXII’) by William Carlos Williams is considered perhaps the foremost example of IMAGISM.  First…

All surveys carried out by retail businesses with a view to generating press coverage should be treated with extreme caution,…

Q. What is the etiquette of hospital visiting? A friend in his fifties is about to spend six weeks in…

Rugby’s autumn internationals are almost upon us and dark thoughts hover over lovers of the sport. One day soon a…

Jean-Georges at the Connaught — formerly the Prince of Saxe-Coburg Hotel, but it was renamed during the first world war,…

Veronica, who looks at Twitter, told me of an exchange she thought would interest me, about the use of the.…