The Spectator
29 September 2018 Aus
Aunty’s dropped her bloomers
Australia
Aunty’s dropped her bloomers
There’s delicious irony in sacked managing director of the ABC, Michelle Guthrie, being replaced by a man. Having pursued the…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
I am in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to visit my daughter. This is my first visit to the Steel City, so to…
Brown study
The criticism of Peter Dutton over the au pair visas was bizarre in three respects. First, one of the frequent…
Latham’s law
There’s a surprisingly simple way of ending the malaise in Australian politics. Turn off the fast forward button. Everything is…
Australian Features
Features Australia, New Zealand
Brash free speech
It’s taken a while, but the speech wars have reached New Zealand – and an Australian is in the thick…
Julia Gillard’s dropouts
In 2008, Julia Gillard announced that the Rudd government’s policy of uncapping university places marked the start of ‘a higher…
Dumbing down
The Commonwealth Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, must be congratulated for rejecting the curriculum model pushed by the OECD’s The…
The media vs the people
‘The separation of powers means that the legal system is answerable to no one,’ I said, speaking at the Sydney…
No real pain in Paris
When the infighting over the Liberal leadership raised the possibility that Australia might join the United States in exiting the…
Fear and loathing in Ultimo
Apropos Michelle Guthrie’s sacking, and the bitchy tweet ‘Excellent decision’ by Four Corner’s Sally Neighbour, the ABC has always been…
Trump’s toughness
Let’s talk quotas, ignoring social media morons and Trump’s toughness. The first topic has to do with all those laments…
Features
All by herself: Theresa May and the politics of isolation
Few people would choose to celebrate their birthday by listening to Philip Hammond speak, but that is the pleasure that…
The minister for spinning plates: David Lidington interview
David Lidington is the most powerful minister you’ve never heard of. He is Theresa May’s de facto deputy, tasked with…
How do you solve a problem like Anjem Choudary?
Next month the Islamist preacher Anjem Choudary will be released from prison, having served just half of his five-and-a-half-year sentence.…
Tesco’s new Brexit supermarket doesn’t stack up
Supermarkets have always moved with the times. After the recession we wanted affordable luxury, so we got M&S’s ‘Dine in…
Adam Smith would have approved of Trump’s trade tariffs
‘What the hell is going on?’ That anxious wail of economic incomprehension has been heard ever since President Trump decided…
Of course Russians have a sense of humour – just look at the Salisbury ‘tourists’
The comedy of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, the two glum Russian ‘tourists’ who denied on television that they were…
The Yorkshire town that’s gone from dirty old buildings to New Age nirvana
Bernard Ingham once told a story about a reporter from the Financial Times who went to cover an election in…
The Week
This should be Theresa May’s last conference as Tory leader
The worst of Britain’s post-war mistakes, ideas we thought long dead, are once more in the air. Yet again there…
Portrait of the week: Theresa May’s fury at the EU and Labour’s Brexit chaos
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, held a special cabinet to retrieve something from the wreckage of the Brexit policy…
Prue Leith: Forget home remedies — morphine is the real way to cure cramp
Is it just my age, or has summer always galloped past with indecent haste? No sooner do the reluctant leaves…
Why the Tories are three times more welcome in Birmingham than Liverpool
Beastly crimes Police in Croydon stopped investigating a series of cat killings after concluding that foxes were likely to blame.…
Allenby’s triumph
From ‘The Eastern successes’, 28 September 1918: The glorious news from Palestine and Macedonia has exceeded all expectations. The annihilating…
Where there’s a quid there must be a quo
The 5th century bc Athenian historian Thucydides proposed that the driving force behind interstate relations was power and fear. But…
Letters: Every generation is scared of new technology. We shouldn’t be
Neutral technology Sir: Jenny McCartney’s ‘wake-up call’ (22 September) reminded me of a 19th-century Scientific American piece I discovered describing a dangerous…
Columnists
Rod Liddle: In defence of marriage
I took part in a debate organised by the Times this week about reform of our divorce laws. Well, I…
The cuddly new John McDonnell is more dangerous than Corbyn
‘Wherever Sir Stafford Cripps has tried to increase wealth and happiness,’ wrote the Conservative Scottish journalist Colm Brogan, ‘grass never…
Why are men being such wusses over #MeToo?
‘There are two sides to every story’ is an aphorism you don’t hear often lately. Ask anyone amidst a family…
McDonnell’s one-term mission to turn Britain into the new Venezuela
The least convincing thing said by Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell at the Labour party conference in Liverpool was ‘I…
Books
Nietzsche’s intense friendship with Wagner forms the core of Sue Prideaux’s excellent new biography
In 1945, with the second world war won bar the shouting, Bertrand Russell polished off his brief examination of Friedrich…
Myth-making from ancient to modern – but Metamorphica doesn’t quite live up to Ovid
‘My spirit moves me to speak of forms changed into new bodies,’ proclaimed Ovid at the beginning of the Metamorphoses:…
The English clergy at their oddest – a compendium
As the wordy title of this book and the name of its author suggest, this is a faux-archaic, fogeyish journey…
Diarmaid MacCulloch delves deep into the soul of Thomas Cromwell – administrator, henchman and evangelical
The final moments of Hilary Mantel’s magnificent Wolf Hall see its central protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, trying to banish ghosts. Assailed…
Home at last – a celebration of 200 years of the Travellers Club
The Travellers Club was founded in 1819 to provide congenial surroundings for those who had ‘travelled outside the British Islands…
Two football books examine where money is taking the modern game
‘Football holds a mirror to ourselves,’ Michael Calvin asserts in State of Play. Modern football is angrier, more brutal, more…
Michael Palin follows the Erebus – an historic ‘adventure’ with a tragic outcome
In May 1845, HMS Erebus and her sister ship HMS Terror set sail for the Arctic, never to be seen…
Sarah Perry’s Melmoth is a great read, but not a great novel
‘What might commend so drab a creature to your sight, when overhead the low clouds split and the upturned bowl…
A hedge-fund protagonist – Gary Shteyngart takes aim in Lake Success
‘We lived in a country that rewarded its worst people. We lived in a society where the villains were favoured…
Ian Kershaw recounts Europe’s recovery from WWII – have the good times run their course?
When I reviewed the first volume of Sir Ian Kershaw’s wrist-breaking history of the last 100 years of Europe, To…
Self-Help goes mainstream – can Marianne Power survive her own quest?
Is there anyone left who’d still be mortified to have it known that they’d purchased, or maybe even benefited from,…
Lights – stories of the sea, and those whose mission is to save us
The story — or rather, stories — of how the British lighthouses were built has already withstood heavy and repeated…
Arts
Brett Anderson on fame, fear and being 50
‘I always think they’re not lusting after me,’ Brett Anderson says of the middle-aged fans who still turn up to…
There’s almost nothing in this Hayward show – and that’s the point
A reflection on still water was perhaps the first picture that Homo sapiens ever encountered. The importance of mirrors in…
Angela Carter was a master of radio drama
The writer Angela Carter (born in 1940) grew up listening to the wireless, her love of stories, magic and the…
Glenn Close rescues this clumsy new adaptation: The Wife reviewed
The Wife is an adaptation of the Meg Wolitzer novel (2003) and stars Glenn Close. Her performance is better than…
Opera North’s Tosca will leave you quivering
At the end of Act Two of Tosca there are some 30 bars of orchestral music — accompaniment to a…
The Old Vic’s Sylvia may be the new Les Mis
Sylvia, the Old Vic’s musical about the Pankhurst clan, has had a troubled nativity. Illness struck the cast during rehearsals.…
Forget the BBC – only Channel 5 does proper documentaries these days
What a load of utter tripe Bodyguard (BBC1, Sundays) was. Admittedly, I came to it late having missed all the…
Bravura piss-taking from Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo
‘Ballet is woman’ insisted George Balanchine, but ballet can also be a big man in a dress as any fan…
Some Brandenburg section leaders
‘Celebrating 30 Years of Baroque’ is Paul Dyer’s theme of the 2019 Season of the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra; 30 years…
Life
I’m an equal of Socrates and Wittgenstein — and if anyone disputes it they can go to hell
The grandest view of Gstaad and the surrounding Saanen valley bar none — and that includes the vista from my…
450 bottles of red? What more could I want from a neighbour
I have a friend here in this French village to which we moved just over a week ago. He is…
Why mutilate a perfectly good pronoun?
‘I’m just going to pop yourself on hold,’ said the girl from the online shopping firm who was trying to…
The joy of a rainy Newbury
Mill Reef, who won the Derby, the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eclipse and the King George by far…
Batumi Olympiad
The Chess Olympiad for national teams is now underway in Batumi, Georgia. Over 200 teams are competing and the lavish…
no. 525
White to play. This position is from Rogers-Milos, Manila Olympiad 1992. How can White do better than recapturing on c3?…
Holiday hell
In Competition No. 3067 you were invited to provide a tale of travel misery on behalf of a well-known traveller…
2378: Boundary
One unclued light, a term for a boundary of an area whose name is formed by two unclued lights, is…
to 2375: 2
Unclued lights are MOONS OF (1A) SATURN (9), which are OTHERWORLDLY (2). First prize Don Young, Shaw, OldhamRunners-up Samantha Pine,…
Of course the young like socialism – they’re taught to
It beggars belief that Jeremy Corbyn can, with a straight face, announce that capitalism has failed and we’d all be…
Markets are clever precisely because people are silly
A month ago I wanted to travel to Bath for a 60th birthday party. From Kent, this either involves a…
Dear Mary: Is it really forbidden to eat with a fork’s tines facing upwards?
Q. My husband and I have been invited to the birthday party of a distinguished public figure with whom we…
Stockbridge, Hampshire: an unexpected gastronomical haven
‘The doors clap to, the pane is blind with showers / Pass me the bottle, old lad, there’s an end of summer.’…
Why ‘embolden’ is a word in a million — and it’s currently in vogue
Embolden is a word in a million. In other words it is quite common. Using data from Google Books, the…
