Could somebody please disband the miserable committees whose ‘job’ it is to select the so-called ‘Australian of the Year’? No…

As a lover of cricket and history, the chance to witness the first-ever day-night Test match was something I was…

‘Off the table’ is no bad thing

Witness the Great Unquestioning of multicultural ideology

Oxfam appear more concerned with the rich than the poor

Cars as we know them are all set to change

Exposure to the liberal, modern, progressive world may not be enough to stem the lust for unthinkable barbarism

What started as a baffling skirmish on the wilder shores of victim culture has now turned into something more menacing

President Erdogan’s increasingly tyrannical regime is suppressing the truth about its war on the Kurds

Rubbing shoulders with the hunters, urban cowboys and trigger-happy heroes at Las Vegas’s Shot Show

An interview with Anne-Marie Slaughter

Without the public’s trust, it’s nothing. And it’s working hard to forfeit that trust

Matt Ridley’s South Atlantic notebook, on explorers’ legacies, the Falklands and a mine-clearing midfielder

Picture for picture, it has perhaps the most concentrated collection of masterpieces anywhere

Their data is dodgy, they disregard the facts and their leaders are lazy

Home Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, prepared a paper on the four areas of concern between Britain…

Also in Fraser Nelson’s diary: a minister in economy class, and how to do your bit for social mobility

Also in our Barometer column: the fate of beached whales, and the fastest and slowest commutes

Professor Louise Richardson says she’s not sure how to judge teaching. But Quintilian knew

From ‘The Crimes of Germany’, The Spectator, 29 January 1916: It would be a relief, a partial solution, if only…

Punishing failure Sir: Once I finished chuckling at Neil Brown’s words on Christopher Pyne’s NPC plan for encouraging innovation in…

Better to let it fall apart while still on board than get the blame for its demise, say Tory ministers

Our metropolitan elite aren’t just silly. They have a nasty side, too

I’ve invested in a fund that will aim to short-sell overvalued renewable energy stocks

Plus: Google’s taxes; and why Scunthorpe Ladies’ Luncheon Club is my Davos

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s gripping account of life under the tsars shows how Russia has always been dedicated to autocracy

Simon Barnes’s Sacred Combe in Zambia is not the idyll he imagines— and his bumptious optimism is exasperating

According to Ioan Grillo’s Gangster Warlords we are now all in thrall to Latin America’s drug cartels for just about every commodity

According to Jack Shenker, things could hardly be worse for this great country after its tragically failed revolution

This setting of the Merchant of Venice in Cheshire’s golden triangle is a serious comic masterpiece

Essays by Shirley Hazzard and the late Christopher Hitchens make for outstanding reading — in very different ways

Maria Konnikova explains the subtle wiles of the grifter— but might her book itself be an elaborate con?

Adam Skolnik tries to fathom what makes people risk their lives in this pitiless sport

Boys in the Trees, the singer-songwriter’s extraordinarily intimate memoir, covers adultery, addiction and marriage to sweet baby James

Jeff Noon reviews detective fiction from Nicholas Searle, Thomas W. Hodgkinson, Ragnar Jónasson and Tim Baker

Here it is, yet another book on the Dismissal. The fall of Gough Whitlam in 1975 has created quite a…

Astrup’s childlike vision, drenched in the wet hues and strange rituals of his western Norway, are finally being recognised at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Monet emerges triumphantly from the distracting emphasis on rhododendrons and watering-cans in the Royal Academy’s Painting the Modern Garden exhibition

In their new production, however, Opera North showed the advantage of not being able to afford temperamental stars or lavish scenery

Deborah Ross wanted the film to give it to the church with both barrels but instead director Tom McCarthy chooses to keep a respectful distance

Plus: Clickbait, a new play at Theatre 503 that offers a refreshing take on internet porn

We are all to blame for the spread of background noise. Many feel uneasy with silence and want to be jollied along. Yet piped music is bad for our mental and physical health

Plus: A.L. Kennedy has some nightmarish observations in The Essay on Radio 3 and Tuesday afternoon’s drama on Radio 4 dares to offer ten seconds of silence

For anybody who holds to the quaint notion that documentaries should be true, it would represent a serious betrayal if it weren’t

If your backyard is good enough to have been considered for inclusion in the Open Garden Scheme then I’m sorry…

The media may crucify him, but he speaks to a white working class ignored by the bien-pensant elites

My superb mechanic is a master of his trade but a monomaniacal conspiracy-theorist

It’s easy: just ask how much they charge to remove a pea-sized cyst from a spaniel

The recipient will be genuinely grateful — unlike charities, who spy on and persecute their benefactors

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same… Well, Kipling obviously never…

This week I conclude my homage to the great Estonian grandmaster Paul Keres, who was born a century ago this…

White to play. This is from Keres-Mardle, Hastings 1964. How did Keres ignite his attack? Answers to me at The…

In Competition No. 2932 you were invited to submit up to 16 lines of verse that are the fruit of…

Each of eleven clues contains a misprinted letter in the definition part. Corrections of misprints spell the source (three words)…

Each partial answer indicated by a clue in italics is KNOCKED INTO A COCKED HAT (5 39). Resulting entries at…

It has been accepted that the absence of black nominees for the Oscars is to do with racism … but is it?

Painless payment is a peerless consumerist mind-hack, and it could transform the traditional British pub

Plus: The ultimate home for some old Christmas cards; and advice on shooting etiquette

The land of the reivers powered the British empire, and still has a role to play in business

A vogue usage that has been so done to death that even its jocular use is becoming wearisome