PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

29 October 2022 Aus

Step up

Sunak’s first test will be getting through winter

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

The coal miner’s Diamonds

Gina Rinehart was correct to withdraw the extraordinarily generous $15 million she had donated to Netball Australia following a severe…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Super delusions

Future retirees risk being betrayed

Features Australia

Doubting the cognoscenti

On nearly every front the ‘experts’ keep getting it wrong

Features Australia

Business/Robbery, etc.

The high cost of BHP’s obsession with the E of ESG

Features Australia

Uh-oh! Dan intervenes…

Just when you thought energy plans couldn’t get any worse

Features Australia

Dangerous storms lie ahead

Xi Jinping continues down the totalitarian dead end

Features Australia

Weak West made in China

Unforgiveably, our military is not all it’s cracked up to be

Features Australia

Red wave rising

Promising signs for the right in the US mid-terms

Features Australia

DFAT now even dafter

Signature template flags preferred pronouns

Features Australia

Engineering disaster

Remaking the power grid to fail

Features Australia

Aux bien pensants

Covid dictatorship - never again!

Features

Features

Call of duty

How will his Hinduism inform the new Prime Minister?

Notes on...

Candles

Under the sink. That’s where most of us will be keeping a stash of candles in case the lights go…

Features

Step up

Sunak’s first test will be getting through winter

Features

‘Pure carnage’

The horror of writing Liz Truss’s biography

Features

Liz Truss: my part in her downfall

Her former economic adviser on what went wrong

Features

Whopping lie

Why are fat men seen as cuddly but fat women as a problem?

Features

Down to the wire

Britain’s undersea cable network is horribly vulnerable

Features

Radical tradition

The future of feminism is conservative

Features

Papal bull

The shame of the Vatican’s ‘respectful dialogue’ with the CCP

The Week

Diary

Diary

After the shale gas vote, I was literally sent to Coventry – to visit the UK Battery Industrialisation Centre. It…

Barometer

Barometer

Prime numbers At 42, Rishi Sunak is Britain’s youngest PM since Lord Liverpool took office the day after his 42nd…

Ancient and modern

A dog’s life

Nine exceedingly passive ‘activists’ glued themselves to the floor of a Volkswagen factory in Germany and complained about being humiliated,…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home Rishi Sunak, aged 42, became Prime Minister. At the weekend Boris Johnson had flown back from a holiday in…

Letters

Letters

Sculpting a solution Sir: Noel Malcolm’s article ‘Relief fund’ (22 October) rightly suggests that legislators should consider the issue of…

Leading article

A milder winter

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, German protesters lined the streets holding placards saying ‘Better a cold shower than Putin’s…

Columnists

Any other business

Business and markets offer Sunak a tentative welcome

Let’s hope Tuesday’s partial eclipse of the sun was a good omen for the return of Rishi Sunak to Downing…

Columns

Will the Tory truce hold?

During the summer leadership race between Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, Sunak’s team were braced for a bloodbath if he…

Columns

When money rots

Punters and pundits alike reacted to rising mortgage rates in the wake of Truss’s mini-Budget with indignant horror. Leaving aside…

Columns

The real cause of all the chaos

Theresa May’s premiership is now a memory. Boris Johnson’s time in office assumes the status of a rather brief, if…

Columns

Licence to kill

So much is happening on the surface at the moment that it can be difficult to notice certain undercurrents. Since…

Columns

Playing at morality

The pop-up ad I get most frequently these days is David Beckham’s promotional video for the Islamic sandpit of Qatar,…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

I have seen it suggested that because Rishi Sunak is a Hindu, it would be wrong for him to have…

Books

More from Books

Ruthless efficiency

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories…

More from Books

Sail away from the safe harbour

Here’s a treat for Christmas: a bona fide literary treasure for under a tenner. And a handsome little hardback, too,…

More from Books

We are all stardust

It seems something of a disservice to a work of this seriousness to say how beautiful it is, but that…

More from Books

The horrors of lynching

Percival Everett’s 22nd novel The Trees was that rare thing on this year’s Booker shortlist: a genre novel. Only which…

More from Books

No more Mr Nice Guy

Volodymyr Zelensky is one of the few leaders of modern times whose charisma, determination and sheer cojones can be said,…

Lead book review

The give and take of friendship

Claudia FitzHerbert explores the complex bond between two remarkable writers in the interwar years

Arts

Australian Arts

Grace and lucidity

The news of Carmen Callil’s death last week shocked the literary world even though it was expected. She made an…

Opera

But what about the plot?

You wouldn’t like Tamerlano when he’s angry. ‘My heart seethes with rage,’ he sings, in Act III of Handel’s opera…

Dance

One long moan of woe

I was moved and shaken by Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern when I first saw it in 2017. In richly visualised…

Pop

Something special

Bob Dylan has always toyed with audiences. He plays what he wants, how he wants, letting his mood dictate tempo…

Cinema

Sick at heart

The latest film from Ruben Ostlund received an eight-minute standing ovation after its screening in Cannes and also won the…

Theatre

Clown or vicar – who cares?

London has a brand-new theatre – yet again. Last summer, a cabaret venue opened in the Haymarket for the first…

Television

Dog days of the USSR

Russia 1985-1999: TraumaZone – even the title makes you want to scream – is Adam Curtis’s Metal Machine Music: the…

Pop

Something special

A reliable metric for measuring pop success is hard to find these days, as Michael Hann noted in these pages…

Exhibitions

The artist’s artist

Pity the poor curators of major exhibitions struggling to find fresh takes on famous masters. The curators of Tate Modern’s…

Arts feature

Fight club

Not all video games are war games but those that are do something deeply unpleasant to our brains, says Sam Kriss

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

My wife gave me a rude but loving shove in bed this morning. ‘Well,’ she asked, ‘are you going to…

Aussie Life

Language

Have you ever come across the ‘Oxford comma’? If you haven’t, here’s a short explanation. When you have a list…

More from life

Bananas Foster

I’m a sucker for a challenge. I absolutely cannot resist a little competition. Throw down a gauntlet, and I am…

Bridge

Bridge

I get very tense, not to say cranky, if I’m interrupted while playing bridge. But last week I decided it…

Competition

Dear diary

In Competition No. 3272, you were invited to imagine a well-known diarist, real or fictitious, commenting on contemporary events. This…

The Wiki Man

Southeastern’s on the wrong track

A few years ago I wrote here about the unexpected symbiosis between economy passengers and business travellers on commercial flights.…

Crossword

2579: Destructive plot

One unclued entry (three words) gives the theme, and five others give two-word names directly connected with it. Remaining unclued…

Low life

Low life

The day British media commentators were christening Rishi’s coronation as Britain’s ‘Obama moment’, French ones were calling the particularly horrible…

Real life

Real life

By the time I got through to someone at British Gas to complain about them holding £491 of my money…

High life

High life

New York Ms Geniece Draper is a Noo Yawker who has been in the news lately. She is a 40-year-old…

Mind your language

Great British

Sir Keir Starmer told his party conference last month that a Labour government would within a year set up a…

Drink

Life of the party

A few days ago, when everything looked black, a small group of us were consoling ourselves over a couple of…

Chess

Losing their heads

Chess players tend to fidget while they think. They crack their knuckles, stir their coffee, and bounce their legs. I…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2576: After Eleven

The unclued lights are names of the men who followed Armstrong and Aldrin (Apollo 11) in walking on the moon…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Your problems solved

Q. I have a hatred of paper napkins – eating outside, they blow away; inside, people drop them on the…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle No. 726

White to play. Salov-Horvath, Groningen 1983. In this treacherous rook and pawn endgame, White found the only winning move. What…

The turf

The turf

When things went wrong in his days running the Daily Mirror, the scoundrel Robert Maxwell used to shout: ‘Which effing…

No sacred cows

At last, a PM I can look down to

Rishi Sunak’s victory is a testament to how much progress we have made on the equalities front. As recently as…