The Albanese government have made excellent use of the long winter break, taking advantage of the warmer weather in the…

Unfortunately, we live in times of rampant corruption in civil society and a complete lack of integrity and morals in…

The Duke of Woke takes on the US Supreme Court

Climate catastrophists are in denial about our dependence on fossil fuels

Hotel designers didn’t get the memo on aesthetics and practicality

Colombo’s crisis is Beijing’s opportunity

Peter Dutton must make the ‘right’ choice

The Left is winning the language wars

Overturning Roe will embolden progresssive judges

Behind the push for change is a power grab

There’s a high price to pay for defying trans dictates

Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own…

Why Sunak suddenly finds himself facing defeat

The threat our politicians don’t seem to have noticed

The NHS is letting down patients in small, crucial ways

Making memories is different in the digital age

As the leadership contest hots up, Charles Moore and Rishi Sunak sit down for a chat

Why this mad insistence that everyone has special powers?

During the eurozone crisis, southern European states had to go cap in hand to Germany to stave off national bankruptcy.…

Home In a television debate between the two contenders for the leadership of the Conservative party (and hence the prime…

Two and a half years ago I joined the Tory party to vote for Boris, then unjoined as soon as…

Get fracking Sir: All credit to The Spectator for grabbing the cancelled Tory leadership debate slot (‘The final three’, 23…

The battle to be PM raises the question: in a functioning democracy, how should arguments be won? Surely, by persuasion.…

The longest heatwave How did the recent heatwave compare with that of 1976? That year, the temperature peaked at 35.9˚C…

The government’s ‘cost-of-living tsar’, Just Eat co-founder David Buttress, was appointed last month as a Canutian gesture against the inflation…

In theory, the Conservative leadership contest could have stretched to the autumn, but the 1922 Committee and CCHQ decided to…

I’ve been lucky enough in my working life so far to hold a string of jobs that have allowed me…

David Trimble, who has just died, has rightly been praised for his courage. History may prove him to have been…

I see that Cricket Scotland is an appalling institution riven with racism. It has just been subjected to ‘the most…

If you happened to be walking through Southwark this week you might have been accosted by a big public sign.…

In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He…

Until very recently, political assassination was a mercifully uncommon occurrence in British politics, though that has changed. Previously when such…

Lawrence Osborne’s novels are easy to admire. They tend to deal with characters trapped in morally questionable situations and their…

Jody Rosen lives and cycles in Brooklyn, which makes him what the Mexican essayist Julio Torri calls ‘a suicide apprentice’.…

DNA test kits may have been all the rage in recent years, but how much can they really tell us…

Summer is a time for blockbusters and Anthony Marra has delivered the goods with Mercury Pictures Presents, a sweeping book…

Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…

Sydney Kentridge, the protagonist of Thomas Grant’s superb legal saga The Mandela Brief, is that trickiest of biographical subjects: a…

In February 1941 four US officers were landed from a British warship at Sheerness, bundled into vehicles and driven to…

Julia Blackburn’s Dreaming the Karoo is the diary of a very bad year: from March 2020, when a research trip…

Matthew Arnold cannot have been much fun on holiday. Watching waves crash on the pebbles at Dover Beach, he heard…

Andrew Lycett on the pugnacious British press baron dedicated to fighting the first world war through newsprint

Whatever one thinks of the government’s plans to send refugees to Rwanda, it was amusing to see this country’s left…

It’s cheering to hear such good reports of the performance of Mahler’s second symphony by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra under…

Simon Godwin’s Much Ado About Nothing is set in a steamy Italian holiday resort, the Hotel Messina, in the 1920s.…

Sam Kriss on why country-pop is the most modern music there is

When TV makes shows about TV, it rarely has a good word to say for itself. In the likes of…

‘I like the way he puts on paint,’ Milton Avery said about Matisse in 1953, but that was as much…

It doesn’t help the cause of The Railway Children Return that the original 1970 Railway Children film is currently on…

Grade: A+ The difficult question with Black Midi was always: are you listening to them in order to admire them,…

Delius and Puccini: how’s that for an operatic odd couple? Delius, that most faded of British masters, now remembered largely…

New US Ambassador Caroline Kennedy had them at her first media conference interjection: when the white, stale male journalist (the…

It was Will Self (writing in The Speccie) who drew my attention to the new word ‘uberise.’ He says he…

Sometimes this column has a guest reviewer: a dining companion. It was Liz Truss in late summer 2011, for the…

‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy…

On International Chess Day, 20 July, Magnus Carlsen announced that he will not defend his world championship title next year.…

Somewhere in 23D 30 July is important. Remaining unclued lights (including two pairs and a trio) give the place’s capital…

In Competition No. 3259, you were invited to submit a poem entitled ‘A(n) [insert county of your choice] Lad’. There…

Are petrolheads’ days numbered? I only ask because having just been introduced to the quiet, petrol-less world of Formula E,…

I’m currently on holiday in Iceland. I say ‘holiday’, but I’m with my three teenage sons so it’s more like…

As suggested by 11 across, the other unclued lights were anagrams of capital cities: 23A Nairobi, 25A Nassau, 29A Lima,…

White to play and mate in two. Composed by Henri Rinck, La Strategie, 1892. Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk…

Q. Everyone was divine at a very jolly lunch I attended in the Cotswolds with the exception of one person,…

In theory TikTok knows nothing about me. I have posted two videos: one of my grandsons kicking a football in…

I now find resorts more fun out of season. Civilised tourists are as rare as an intelligent Hollywood movie, so…

Laikipia You know things are bad when the zebras are thin. Even during most droughts, zebras are like matrons at…

‘That will be £7.50 please,’ said the girl in the bakery to the cyclist in black Lycra after he put…

The bridge world is coming back to life with a bang. The World Championships were held (live) in March, the…