The Spectator
30 June 2018 Aus
Angela’s ashes: Merkel’s grand project is crumbling
Australia
Humbug, hypocrisy and duplicity
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Australia’s current energy policy is close to being insane. We are the world’s…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
As language is a living thing, a mirror of current but ever-changing social mores, we have added two new definitions…
Latham’s law
The education system used to be so straightforward. But now, with the classics of Western civilisation being chucked into the…
Australian notes
Universities of the closed mind A series of leaked emails reveal the depths of prejudice and groupthink at Australia’s universities.…
Australian diary
Having become jaded by years of phony multiculturalism, which in Australia has led to cultural ghettos, dual citizenships, victimhood and…
Australian Features
Sounds from the silence
From Janpath Road in the centre of Delhi, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts appears almost deserted. I’m…
Letter from London
If the crescendo of cranes towering above development blocks represents a city’s prosperity, then Manila and London are prospering. Setting…
Writers are not moral guides
Like Dorothy Parker, I have a decent number of grey hairs from my dealings with the intelligentsia. I’ve had my…
CNN sucks, Trump triumphs
‘CNN sucks…CNN sucks,’ the capacity crowd of rank-and-file Americans in Minnesota’s giant Amsoil Arena chanted. This was their down-to-earth message…
Features
Angela’s ashes: Merkel’s grand project is crumbling
‘This is not about whether Mrs Merkel stays as chancellor next week or not,’ said Xavier Bettel, the Prime Minister…
Mass immigration has destroyed hopes of a borderless society
What kind of a president would build a wall to keep out families dreaming of a better life? It’s a…
The great nanny shortage
There is an au pair drought in the UK. Since the 2016 Referendum there has been a 75 per cent…
Donald Trump’s Space Force isn’t so stupid
Americans traumatised by their current president could be forgiven for thinking that his demand for a ‘space force’ was about…
Fifa may be corrupt but it has done wonders for football
In 1930, Jules Rimet, the creator of the Football World Cup, crossed the Atlantic in a steamship to attend the…
Travel phobia is perfectly reasonable
I have never been an adventurous soul. As an infant in Belfast, I would lie motionless for hours on the…
Who really wants to read feminist children’s books?
A friend of mine who commissions book reviews has added a sub-category to the list of titles coming up: ‘femtrend’,…
The Week
The NHS is 70 – but it’s an unhappy birthday
When Nye Bevan launched the NHS on 5 July 1948, most of the British population could not expect to celebrate…
Portrait of the week
Home The Commons voted in favour of a new runway at Heathrow by 415 votes to 119. Boris Johnson, the…
Why are men so obsessed with dieting?
In this gloriously sunny week, the cavalry horses are off on their summer break to Bodney, Norfolk. They can be…
Fat was not a Greek issue
The UK obesity crisis is again in the headlines, and ‘life-style’ is the culprit. The ancients may have come up…
What happened to the teams who scored more than six goals in a World Cup?
Nursing numbers Was there ever a time when the NHS wasn’t in crisis? According to a report by NHS Health…
Letters: Judging students by achievement is a greater scourge than diversity at any cost
Harvard’s racial quotas Sir: While I largely agree with Coleman Hughes that racial quotas are counterproductive (‘The diversity trap’, 23 June),…
Columnists
The internal logic of the NHS makes it ruthlessly cold-hearted
Gordon Brown, echoing Aneurin Bevan, says that the greatest gift that the NHS brings to people is ‘serenity’. He is…
July 2018 could prove to be Theresa May’s cruellest month
Theresa May is about to embark on the toughest month of her premiership to date. Next week, she must persuade…
There’s a reason restaurants everywhere are failing: Red Hen Syndrome
Anxious to find out what food they served at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, I clicked on the…
My encounter with the self-righteous cry-bullies of Cambridge
There’s a Tracey Ullman comedy sketch about the extreme and ugly form of political correctness afflicting the youth. It’s set…
Carmakers are an undeniable voice in the Brexit debate
The voice of business has been all but silent in the Brexit debate ever since former Marks & Spencer boss…
Books
The spying game: when has espionage changed the course of history?
Espionage, Christopher Andrew reminds us, is the second oldest profession. The two converged when Moses’s successor Joshua sent a couple…
Foreign bodies galore: the best new crime fiction
Ghosts of the Past by Marco Vichi (Hodder, £18.99) is unashamedly nostalgic in tone. The title could not be more…
Crudo, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has been deservedly lauded for her thoughtful works of non-fiction To the River, The Trip to Echo Spring…
Staggering to Jerusalem — a journey from darkness into light
Guy Stagg walked 5,500 km from Canterbury to Jerusalem, following medieval pilgrim paths, and he records the expedition in The…
Has Tibet finally lost out to China?
Blessings from Beijing will inform readers who know little about Tibet, and those who know a great deal will discover…
The modern celebrity silk: Geoffrey Robertson ticks all the boxes
What makes a barrister famous? At one time, many of the best advocates were also prominent politicians, whose day job…
The great outdoors is a short walk from your front door
When I read about the author on the flyleaf of this book, I must admit my heart sank: ‘Tristan has…
The new biography of Wilhelm Furtwängler is a real labour of loathing
The titans of the podium, a late 19th- and 20th-century phenomenon, a species now extinct, have on the whole been…
Can democracy survive the tidal wave of technological progress?
For a brief moment in 2011, standing among thousands of people occupying Syntagma, the central square in Athens, it looked…
A Weekend in New York, by Benjamin Markovits, reviewed
I wrote foul-mouthed marginalia throughout Benjamin Markovits’s A Weekend in New York. Not because Markovits is a bad writer —…
The electrifying genius of Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla, the man who made alternating current work, wrote to J. Pierpont Morgan, the industrialist and banker. It was…
Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
For someone who is only 47 and has won a Pulitzer Prize, Andrew Sean Greer certainly knows how to get…
A love letter to the short story
On a recent Guardian podcast, Chris Power — who has written a short story column in the Guardian for a…
The industrial kling-klang of ‘Krautrock’
The tricky term ‘Krautrock’ was first used by the British music press in the early 1970s to describe the drones…
Arts
The problem with British mosques
My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member…
How good a painter was Frida Kahlo?
In 2004 Mexican art historians made a sensational discovery in Frida Kahlo’s bathroom. Inside this space, sealed since the 1950s,…
Sexy hints of affluence with top notes of fascism: Grange Park’s Roméo et Juliette reviewed
Patrick Mason’s new production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette reminded me of something, but it took a while to work…
The dumbing down of the Reith Lectures
It’s been a heavyweight week on Radio 4 with the start of the annual series of Reith Lectures and a…
So bad I wanted to escape: An Octoroon reviewed
Intriguing word, ‘octoroon’. Does it mean an eight-sided almond-flavoured cakelet? No, it’s a person whose ancestry is one eighth black.…
Fury and excitement – how the journalists at the New York Times have coped with Trump
Back when his country was controlled by the USSR, the Czech writer Milan Kundera pointed out that ‘Union of Soviet…
Leave No Trace is inaction-packed – yet it pulls you in and keeps you pulled in
Debra Granik, the writer-director who made quite a splash with Winter’s Bone (which launched the career of Jennifer Lawrence in…
Antony Gormley’s art works better in theory than in practice
Antony Gormley has replicated again. Every year or so a new army of his other selves — cast, or these…
An extraordinary, brilliant spectacle: Taylor Swift at Wembley Stadium reviewed
Imagine living Taylor Swift’s life. She has been staggeringly, life-dominatingly famous since she was 17. Not for a single moment…
The Wharf and its neighbour
After 35 years on The Wharf at Walsh Bay, the Sydney Theatre Company has moved out. But it will be…
Life
Is it time to move to Austria?
Schloss Wolfsegg I was watching two very old men slowly approaching the open doors of the Pilatus airplane I…
Why I was proud to be a dustman
I heard the last and final call for flight 6114 to Nice while shuffling forward in the unexpectedly long queue…
Me and my gun
Finally, I got my hands on a gun. About the size of a sawn-off shotgun it was, just under 20in…
A cow is better than a bank balance
Laikipia, Kenya A minotaur head glowers at me through the bathroom window while I am brushing my teeth in…
The Caruana conundrum
Over the course of this year Fabiano Caruana has scored splendidly in tournaments with classical time limits, notching up first…
no. 512
White to play. This position is from Anand-Caruana, Leuven Blitz 2018. How did Anand achieve a winning material advantage? Answers…
Double vision
In Competition No. 3054 you were invited to compose double dactyls about double acts. I didn’t include the rules about…
2365: Beds
One of the clued lights below reveals the theme which Brewer confirms. One of the unclued lights is not paired…
to 2362: MEN OF NOTE IV
The unclued lights are COMPOSERS whose surnames begin with the letter D. First prize E.C. Hynard, GuernseyRunners-up Geran Jones, London…
The problem with deciding that popular culture is ‘problematic’
A controversy has erupted in Folkestone over a forthcoming screening of Zulu, the classic British war film. A charity has…
Never mind VAR – this is a fabulous World Cup
Let’s talk about VAR, why don’t we? We love the World Cup though the football is getting bonkers. The scoring…
Dear Mary: How can I stop a controversial columnist from being sacked?
Q. A close friend is an elderly writer who has contributed, as a monthly columnist, to the same publication for…
Wedge salad in the shadow of the Tudors: Sargeant’s Mess reviewed
Sargeant’s Mess (2018) is a tourist catcher’s net in restaurant form by the Tower of London (c. 1078). It has views…
The origins of the famous blue tiles of Portugal’s buildings have been misunderstood
A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She…
