Not since Gulliver’s Travels has there been such an absurd visual image: a giant of a man towering over a…

Those of my readers who do not reside in Melbourne may not be aware of the significant event underway in…

Winners and losers in the Covid casino

Signs the Tories might finally choose conservatism

Making the Sydney Opera House fit for purpose

Hand over the money

Labor and the Coalition have both drained our coffers

How the Democrats are busy buying up votes

Trudeau, the pope and the missionary

Did the United States back the wrong side in Afghanistan?

We need a royal commission into the abuse of power during Covid

Over the past year and a half, I have been victimised by my neighbour’s cat. Bollinger the Bengal weighs just…

Joseph Roth’s writing about interwar Europe speaks to present-day Ukraine

Dominic Raab on Truss, Sunak — and whether he will serve under them

Can a new economic plan get us through the winter?

Doing nothing is glorious. It is one of life’s deepest pleasures and ultimate goals. Yesterday, I walked a couple of…

Harry and Meghan are back with a vengeance

How success kills friendships

Lockdown saved lives Sir: Rishi Sunak presents an alarming picture of what happened during lockdown (‘The lockdown files’, 27 August)…

Home Liz Truss, the contender for the Conservative party leadership who is expected to become prime minister next Tuesday, resisted…

You wait 11 years for a Tory leadership election and then three come along in quick succession. The first in…

Of mice and Moon What did Nasa achieve last time it visited the Moon? Apollo 17, in December 1972, involved…

In her memoirs, Raisa Gorbacheva recalls the moment when her husband turned from bureaucrat into reformer. ‘I’m in my seventh…

Sir Tony Blair’s Tone-deaf suggestion that Stem subjects should dominate the curriculum of all schools would paradoxically take education back…

‘The jury’s out’, was Liz Truss’s pert response to the question ‘Macron: friend or foe?’ at last week’s Norwich hustings.…

Last week’s Spectator interview with Rishi Sunak conveyed the anti-science ‘science’, the paucity of even fag-packet cost-benefit analysis and the…

Boris Johnson has so dominated politics for the past few years that it is hard to imagine things without him.…

I wonder how many people in the country are bitterly disappointed that Liz Truss pulled out of her exciting one-to-one…

When Liz Truss said ‘the jury’s out’ on whether France was a ‘friend or foe’, Emmanuel Macron publicly corrected her:…

How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you…

On the face of it, a book about a woman stalking one red deer might not sound that exciting. Just…

The encyclopaedias of the past were volumes to be savoured – even if they often contained unsavoury views, says Rose George

In that dark world the air pulsed with the melancholy clangour of bells. If, as legend has it, the chimes…

At first glance, Clara Peeters’s ‘Still Life with a Vase of Flowers, Goblets and Shells’ (1612) appears to be just…

This is a deceptively slim novel. Its 96 pages contain multitudes: two lives, past and present, seamlessly interwoven. The narrator,…

To reject ‘in rainy middle age the poignant emotions that belonged to youth and Italy’ is the lesson learned by…

This book covers the period 1878-2000, offering thought provoking commentary on some 120 years of experiments in being modern, and…

Towards the end of Dandelions, Thea Lenarduzzi’s imaginative and deeply affecting memoir, the author quotes her grandmother’s remark that there…

Every country has an origin story but nonehas ‘changed it so often’ as Russia, according to Orlando Figes. The subject…

The morality of art always seems like such a simple thing. The Greeks want back the so-called Elgin Marbles pilfered…

The Angel of Prisons dramatises the life of the penal reformer Elizabeth Fry, who lived near Canning Town. She married…

In the Rodgers and Hart musical On Your Toes, a Broadway hoofer is forced to work at a community college,…

The American Whine is one of the key vocal registers in rock and roll. You can trace that thin disaffected…

‘Germany’s greatest artistic asset, its music, is in danger,’ warned The Spectator in June 1937. Reporting from the leading new-music…

The Forgiven is based on the novel by Lawrence Osborne and stars Ralph Fiennes (terrific) and Jessica Chastain (ditto) as…

House of the Dragon got off to a pretty uninspirational start, I thought: no major characters brought to a shocking…

Is the onscreen portrayal of investment bankers as monsters true to life? Martin Vander Weyer talks to the writers of Industry

Q. I have had an email inviting me to an old girls’ reunion, class of 1976. The organiser suggested we…

Here’s a paradox. Over the past two-and-a-half years, a cadre of senior politicians and their ‘expert’ advisers across the world…

Some years ago, an Australian neurologist was in the habit of walking barefoot across his lawn. This being Australia, the…

They called it the Match of the Century. A full 50 years has passed since Bobby Fischer defeated Boris Spassky…

August may not be the cruellest month but it is often the most dangerous one. Now that it is over,…

It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard…

The unclued lights were characters in Neighbours, paired at 12/19, 14/20, 16/19 and 32/20. First prize Peter Taylor-Mansfield, Worcester Runners-up…

Irish trainer John F. O’Neill owes the stalls handlers at Goodwood a good drink or two. In Ireland this season…

In Competition No. 3264, you were invited to submit a poem in response to the following journal entry by Wallace…

White to play and win. Composed by Alexey Troitsky, Novoye Vremya, 1895. Trapping Black’s queen looks unimaginable on such an…

It’s possible that, like me, your first encounter with the Grande Dame of the Austrian pastry world, the apfelstrudel, was…

The unclued lights (one of two words) are of a kind.   Across 1 Bringing down plane that was used…

My favourite vet came to see Darcy and immediately put his finger on the problem. Dusk was falling when he…

Nostalgia barged in like gangbusters. What brought it on was a brief article about the most charming and enchanting of…

The beautiful city of Wroclaw in Poland is currently teeming with bridge players, all of them there for the 16th…

Anthony Albanese’s republican sympathies were a matter of public record when a Voice to Parliament wasn’t even a whisper in…

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) once said: ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.’ And if the woke…