Ultimately, prime ministers can only ever be as good as the front bench talent they have selected permits them to…

18C was lost to cultural romanticising and self-interest

A coalition of cartoon-like characters and events could spell the end of John Key’s conservative government

The bitter rivary between two Prime Ministers exposed - over penning stories in the press and cabinet solidarity

The West has no choice other than to intervene - Australia included

The Labor leader clears his name

Ebola is playing a deadly game on a microbial board

Paramedics are fleeing. Needless callouts are mounting. When will the government notice?

Ultra-nationalists like the bizarre Igor Strelkov are the force that Putin feels most need to bend to

This profession resistant to empirical evaluation may harm as much as it helps

As YouTube and Netflix replace the telly, we're losing a set of shared references between age groups

If – and probably when – Yes Scotland loses, where will all that frantic energy go?

You can’t understand any of the world’s crises without understanding petropolitics

Sister Christine Frost on why young men from Tower Hamlets are going to fight in Iraq and Syria

A college reunion can bring back some strange stories. Plus: My house and the people who photograph it

Something always happened when we met, nothing was ever straightforward or everyday, and whatever it was led to laughter-till-we-cried

It was a poker night. Glenmorangie won

A child abuse scandal on this monstrous scale demands more than just the council leader's resignation

Home Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said that Britons who went to Syria or Iraq to fight could be stripped…

Plus: Scotland’s real ruling class, the best kind of holiday cottage, and my malice-laced first novel

Plus: the faiths of Britain’s forces, and what doctors have to be sorry for

The art of matching pleasure with purpose

From ‘Left behind’, The Spectator, 29 August 1914: In the poorer streets a kind of holiday atmosphere prevails, and a sort…

Placing refugees Sir: Tony Abbott seems to have fooled The Spectator. Your editorial (23 August) gives plaudits to the Australian…

EU summits haven't been kind to our Prime Minister. That's not about to change

I believe that it’s part of comedy’s job to test the bounds of decency. But to judge by his attack on Jeremy Clarkson, Frankie doesn’t

Plus: France, Scotland and the graduate circus

A review of Weimar, by Michael H. Kater. An absorbing history about the corruption of a once great artistic centre

Andrew Taylor’s historical crime novel, The Silent Boy, is so good it makes you rethink all your high-low prejudices. It reminds me of Dickens

A review of Peter Levi: Oxford Romantic, by Brigid Allen. A loving biography of a poet priest who went from emaciated El Greco to fat country squire

You may have to read this fictional account of a 15th-century painter at least one-and-a-half times to understand it, but it's worth it

A review of Operation Sealion: How Britain Crushed the German war Machine’s Dreams of Invasion in 1940, by Leo McKinstry. Civil liberties went out the window when the Nazis threatened

A review of Bouts of Mania: Ali, Frazier, Foreman and an America on the Ropes, by Richard Hoffer. Boxing was as much about politics, money and race as fighting

A review of Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective, by Jerry N. Uelsmann. There's no denying that these strange images are part of a venerable tradition – or that a teenager with Photoshop could have done it quicker

A review of The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters. The sex is blazingly described but then, alas, the Plot raises its boring head

A review of In Montmatre: Picasso, Matisse and Modernism in Paris, 1900 – 1910, by Sue Roe. This rollicking read is at its best when describing the bacchanalian squalor

A review of The Dog, by Joseph O’Neill. This riff on Kafka’s The Castle is dominated by a creep but we stay with it because the satire is absurdly funny

A review of A People’s History of the French Revolution, by Eric Hazan. A riveting piece of revisionist history by a dyed-in-the-wool communist

It is not really a surprise that political parties produce a certain number of oddballs; the scary thing is that…

A new box set from the BFI reveals the full extent of the German director’s genius — and insanity

Neither OperaUpClose’s La traviata nor Finborough Theatre’s production of Boughton’s The Immortal Hour quite cut it

Would a few more hits have been such a terrible thing?

The V&A's Disobedient Objects. Plus: an exhibition in Suffolk dedicated to the map-mad younger brother of Eric Gill

It's unjudgmental, unforced, elusive and a joy

But Theatre 503’s unflinching look at the practice of genital mutilation is sophisticated and unpreachy

Plus: ITV’s Prom Crazy, a documentary that’s heroically unafraid of stereotyping

Kate Chisholm immerses herself in the dream logic of Words and Music

Fifty of Ursula von Rydingsvard’s monumental sculptures are now on show in this largest ever exhibition of her work

Oh dear, the Helpmann Awards have come round again. The winners were announced in Sydney’s Capitol Theatre, a most appropriate…

The record of American-backed rulers in the Middle East makes Putin look good

A night out – and a morning after – from my younger days

I'm not complaining, mind you – I get haikus instead

But then, they also keep my house running

This country needs rocket scientists, and brain surgeons – and plumbers

I was talking to the brilliant 27-year old Israeli player Alon Birman at the recent Brighton Congress, when suddenly there…

To round off my coverage of the chess Olympiad in Tromsø, which saw a total of 313 teams in the…

White to play. This position is from Lee-Croes, Tromsø Olympiad 2014. White’s position is overwhelming and he now found a…

In Competition No. 2862 you were invited to submit a poetic preview of when the lights go out. Submissions were…

The titles of four of an artist’s works (9,7; 6,6; 6,2,4; 12) read clockwise round the perimeter from a square…

The key phrase is KNOW WHERE THE SHOE PINCHES (12 38 43). Each of the partially indicated answers is pinched…

There will always be a connection between ‘book learning’ and power. The solution is to spread that knowledge, not to pretend it doesn’t matter

Stats from an anti-smoking group suggest that vaping is the very opposite of a gateway drug

Plus: How to keep Wi-Fi out of your holiday cottage

Anecdotes from a pleasurable life that seems as long ago as Middlemarch

The OED’s contradictory entries on taste words reflect changing scientific attitudes