The video images, acts of violence and racial abuse are shocking. Yet no one appears to be shocked. Certainly not…

So much has been written about the irresponsible extravagance of the Budget that it is difficult to be original. It…

Labor can’t dig its way out of anti-coal hysteria Driving home from the Upper Hunter by-election on Saturday night a…

Covid: robbing the poor to give to the rich

The right-of-centre fights back

Japan to the rescue in the fossil fuel wars

A bizarre program seeks to attract overseas talent

On the mutating variants of bureaucratic advice

Yet again, Trump was right

On the hypocrisy of the progressive Left

Our plan for a backwards nation

What was once a Covid conspiracy theory is looking more plausible

Why rudeness doesn’t pay

Is Sweden ready for a woke monarchy?

The many failures of China’s vaccine programme

Scotland is open – and desperate for English tourists

Sanctions against Putin and his allies don’t work

Henry Walker might never have got into the crisp business were it not for the fact that his Leicester butcher’s…

Let’s leave mental health diagnoses to the professionals

It is hard to deny the importance of the issues raised this week by Dominic Cummings. His decision to identify…

Marrying in office It was announced Boris Johnson will marry his fiancée, Carrie Symonds, next year. This will be only…

Home The BBC was engulfed in doubts after a report by Lord Dyson blamed Martin Bashir for deceiving the late…

In the New York Times, the celebrated journalist Maureen Dowd describes Crieff as ‘a sleepy town in Scotland’. Well. There…

Taking care Sir: I agree completely with Leo McKinstry that care for parents should be paid out of their estate…

Charles, Prince of Wales, is having a little trouble with his son Harry. Romans knew about difficult offspring. They told…

A few weeks ago, more than 2,000 employees of Apple Inc. signed a petition that led to the sacking of…

A terrible thing, to be torn. Last Sunday was International Day to End Obstetric Fistula, a very painful condition affecting…

The more anticipated a parliamentary appearance, the less it tends to live up to its billing. But Dominic Cummings’s testimony…

It’s a dangerous thing when you import the worst aspects of another culture. And an even worse thing when you…

The long-awaited review of the railways by former British Airways executive Keith Williams chugged past the platform of public debate…

It is poetically fitting that the resignation of the chairman of the National Trust, Tim Parker, was announced on the…

Simon Winchester follows the volatile French mission to Ecuador in 1735 to determine the shape of the Earth

The 20th-century Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel did his level best to live in the world as his philosophical hero Gottfried…

Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a…

When the British formed the basis of their empire in the 1600s by acquiring territories in India and North America,…

Welcome to Utopia — not an idyllic arcadia but a secretive tech incubator in a Manhattan office block. Here a…

Perhaps the secret to understanding Russian history lies in its grammar: it lacks a pluperfect tense. In Latin, English and…

Halfway through what must count as one of the more esoteric quests, Jennifer Lucy Allan finds herself on a hill…

A great writer must be prepared to risk ridiculousness — not ridicule, although that may follow, but the possibility that…

This is not a novel about four chickens of various character — Gloria, Miss Hennepin County, Gam Gam and Darkness…

Ezra Pound in ABC of Reading: ‘Dichten = condensare.’ Meaning poetry is intensification, ‘the most concentrated form of verbal expression’.…

‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by cat videos,’ begins Henry Mance’s How to Love Animals, winningly.…

This is a curious book, by turns profound and whimsical. Karl Schlögel, a professor of Eastern European history at Frankfurt,…

It’s an extraordinary thing that a director of Bruce Beresford’s reputation should be directing for Melbourne Opera until you remember…

Demonstrating excellent timing, the Bendigo Art Gallery has announced a major exhibition Brett Whiteley : Drawing is Everything (31 July…

A Russian Doll is a monologue about Putin’s campaign to swing the Brexit vote in his favour. It stars Rachel…

It’s interesting that we have decided shaming and yelling are the easiest ways to change people’s minds. Which is not…

Rejoice: live music is back. Or at least, live music with a live audience, which, as Sir Simon Rattle admitted,…

Stuart Jeffries discusses beauty, Yoko Ono and the world’s disappointments with the first robot artist

Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined…

Steve Morris talks to Gary Numan about luck, plane-spotting and Asperger’s

I’ve been looking at the reviews so far of Sky’s new Romans series Domina and none seems to have noticed…

There is a reason music writers tend to stick with music writing rather than transferring their manifold talents to the…

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cowstars John Magaro, Orion Lee, Toby Jones, and a Jersey cow listed in the credits as ‘Evie’,…

It’s always sad to see the end of a love affair, particularly when the lovers had seemed so enraptured of…

Writing in The Speccie Dot Wordsworth said: ‘The most effective weapon in cultural warfare is to find a form of…

Last August I wrote a column in The Spectator’s US edition urging Donald Trump to take a leaf out of…

The fifth match game between Potter and Zukertort, played in London in 1875, saw a dogged struggle. The final position…

White to play, Kharlov–Ernst, Haninge 1992. Black’s last move, g6-g5 was a decisive mistake. Which move did White play to…

In Competition No. 3200, you were invited to retell one of Chaucer’s tales in the style of another author. The…

The unclued lights, (one pair, one hyphened and one of two words) are of a kind. One clue leads to…

Humans are herd animals too. Jockeys, trainers, owners and those enjoying the few prized media attendance slots for racing behind…

New York The Big Bagel is getting so bad that even the baddies are demanding the fuzz do something. As…

One of the pleasures of kibitzing online tournaments is that when an intriguing hand comes up, you can flick back…

‘We’re closed for lunch,’ said the farmer, sitting behind the counter of his farm shop with a scowl on his…

Whatever became of athletics? It’s fallen nearly as far as show jumping and that is a long way. But the…

The unclued lights are the final headwords for B, D, E, F, S, T, U, W, as listed in Chambers.…

Walking up through the Stink Street medieval arch with a bag of shopping, I spotted Michael between the oleander branches…

The Roof Garden is a pale, Nordic-style restaurant at the top of the glorious Pantechnicon in Belgravia — formerly a…

Q. Once restrictions are lifted, our annual walking group has planned a week’s walk with after-walk gatherings in a different…

‘Why didn’t they call it Very British Railways?’ asked my husband. Unwittingly (as in most of his remarks), he had…