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The Spectator

29 July 2023 Aus

All the President’s men

The Biden scandal is far worse than Watergate

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Self-harming the nation

As usual, it takes John Howard to cut to the chase with one pithy comment, in this instance on the…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

Last week we looked at whether the proposed Voice will give rise to an avalanche of litigation and we argued…

Australian Features

Features Australia

All the President’s men

The Biden scandal is far worse than Watergate

Features Australia

Windsor change

The King’s commitment to steer clear of politics didn’t last long

Features Australia

Acma and bad law

The new misinformation bill is a disgrace

Features Australia

In it for who?

Labour mocks New Zealanders with its absurd new slogan

Features Australia

Aboriginal voices on the Voice

Indigenous Australians say No to ‘just another trick’

Features Australia

Are rock music critics extinct?

We used to be able to tell you what was worth listening to

Features

Features

Paying their way

Labour’s new private donors

Features

‘Sadiq Khan is a misogynist’

The Tory candidate for London mayor lets rip

Features

Chinese whispers

Where has Xi’s foreign minister gone?

Features

Swarm troopers

Inside Ukraine’s drone army

Features

Censors and sensitivity

The drive for inclusivity in children’s publishing

Features

Own goal

Football fans’ loyalty no longer lies with clubs, but players

The Week

Leading article

Banking crisis

The Coutts scandal can be traced back to the day, two years ago, when the bank proudly announced that it…

Diary

Diary

In this summer of sporting dramas, every patriotic sports fan likes to think he’s done his bit to help. I…

Columnists

Columns

Intersectionality is a dud

The almost complete absence of anything remotely resembling an intersection in the progressive doctrine of intersectionality poses a problem for…

Columns

The price of populism

Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), dropped the bomb last weekend. In a TV interview, Merz…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

We now have a reluctant apology from Dame Alison Rose, followed by her even more reluctant resignation. Her departure is…

Columns

Was I right about Iraq?

Back in March there was a glut of pieces about the 2003 Iraq war. The 20th anniversary seemed to much…

Columns

Why would you ever leave?

For British taxpayers perturbed by their £6 million daily bill for housing asylum seekers in hotels, New York City mayor…

Columns

Coutts, Farage and the trouble with choice

Dame Alison Rose should not have resigned as head of NatWest over the Nigel Farage affair – and ministers who…

Books

More from Books

Constantly frit

Catherine Taylor describes her anxiety growing up in Sheffield against an ‘uneasy backdrop’ of picketing miners, the Hillsborough disaster and a serial killer on the loose

More from Books

Sinister siblings

A brother and sister are dispatched to a relative’s farm in Colorado, and grow up isolated, unfeeling and even estranged from each other

More from Books

Worthless pieces of paper

The first banknotes were greeted with deep suspicion in 1769 – but it was nothing to the distrust that Soviet and post-Soviet issues aroused

More from Books

Centuries of martyrs

There is no redemption in this account of the birth of Latin Christendom, with ‘heretics’ suffering cruelly for the beliefs, just as Christian martyrs had under the Romans

More from Books

The perils of permissiveness

The erotic adventures of a teenager who finally meets her match became a succès de scandale in 1920, and will still raise eyebrows today

More from Books

Bold, brave and determined

Andrew Harding describes the hastily assembled ‘Dad’s Army’ – and formidable babushka – who sensationally resisted the Russian advance on Voznesensk last year

More from Books

Beware of pity

In her powerful memoir-cum-manifesto, Selina Mills tells us what she misses most, what irritates her most and why she won’t have a guide dog

More from Books

City of contradictions

Before the Troubles hijacked its reputation, the city was renowned for its linen industry and great shipyards, responsible for an eighth of the global shipbuilding trade

More from Books

Glamour and grime

Of the Stones’ talented wives and girlfriends, Anita Pallenberg contributed most, dictating the band’s style and even how they should remix tracks

More from Books

A dangerous Christ-complex

His fateful intransigence over the negotiations has been variously ascribed to a Christ-complex, an unhappy childhood and even latent homosexuality

Lead book review

Echoes of Chekhov

Alex Clark enjoys a poignant story centring on a cherry orchard, three sisters and their mother’s past love affair

Arts

Australian Arts

Magniloquent horror

The experience of watching Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy, his film with Cate Blanchett as the nun running an orphange…

Opera

All’s well that ends well

Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set…

Pop

Salve Regina

We’ll get on to the brilliance of Regina Spektor in a moment. But first a question: why are pop music…

Cinema

Splitting headache

Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant quantum physicist and ‘father of the atomic bomb’ who…

Theatre

Comic relief

The boss of the Royal Court, Vicky Featherstone, will soon step down and she’s using her final spell in charge…

More from Arts

Top cat

If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…

Television

Death by a thousand cuts

I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University…

Exhibitions

We’re off to see the wizard

At the Paris International Exhibition of 1867, Mark Twain was mesmerised by a life-sized silver swan with ‘a living grace…

Arts feature

Here comes the Hun

Hungarian culture is living through a golden age, says Igor Toronyi-Lalic, and the West has much to learn from it

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

Wellbeing is complicated. Like junk food and cigarettes, we need professionals to explain it to us, maybe with an expensive…

Aussie Life

Language

The compound noun ‘rage apply’ is (I am told) the name being given to a new trend in workplaces around…

Drink

A serious Burgundy

It was the English summer at its most perverse. We were drinking Pimm’s while hoping against hope for better news…

No sacred cows

Barbie deserves the backlash

Being the CEO of a massive corporation isn’t easy. You’re expected to grow the company, increase profits and boost the…

The Wiki Man

Who deserves a free lunch?

It is a tenet of neo-liberal economics that there is no such thing as a free lunch. This is obvious…

Competition

Verse in reverse

In Competition No. 3309, you were invited to compose a poem starting with the last line of any well-known poem…

The turf

The turf

‘God it’s hot,’ said a Newbury waitress escaping into the lift from rain-soaked crowds jostling in the bars last Saturday.…

Real life

Real life

Having loaded the last sack of working dog food in Surrey into my car, I slammed the trolley back into…