After 2016, one of the most lacklustre, uneventful and stagnant years in Australian political history, there is every reason to…

Here at the Spectator Australia Electoral Reform Unit, we certainly had our hands full in 2016, what with Brexit, and…

Integration is backPeter Dutton has signalled that provisional migrants should be treated as temporary residents until they have ‘proven their…

Standing next to the large lobby Christmas tree in ‘Sunjoy Mansion’ where the Australian has its modest office in Beijing,…

It’s not just the money cost of Senator Hinch’s amateurish meddling with legislation like the Australian Building and Construction Commission,…

The Booker Prize winning author Yann Martel wrote in The Life of Pi that reason was the fool’s gold of…

Long before Trump & Brexit… President Trump’s landslide is just the beginning. Better than the sight of battalions of experts…

‘The world has gone mad. Donald Trump is president of the United States and now Reverend Fred Nile is strolling…

‘Prison did not touch me,’ declares Pussy Riot’s Maria ‘Masha’ Alyokhina, raising her eyebrows with a sardonic smirk. I am…

I’m sitting by the pool in a lush Moroccan garden playing chess with Nigel Short, and I feel like an…

Europeans are usually alarmed or sniffy about American concern for democracy’s fate, but this time liberal opinion on both sides…

After the tumult of 2016, Europe could do with a year of calm. It won’t get one. Elections are to…

This being the time of year for it, you’re probably thinking what form your New Year New You will take.…

In a quiet backstreet in Geneva, a few blocks from the lakeside, there is a museum which will change the…

 Batavia, New York The presidential campaign just ended was mercifully lacking in the ghostwritten platitudes with which Franklin D. Roosevelt,…

At the Westfield shopping centre in east London, the queues started at 2 a.m. on Christmas night. In Wrexham, people started…

‘Ah, beware of snobbery,’ said Cary Grant, who was surprisingly often the smartest guy in the room. ‘It is the unwelcome recognition…

My year was topped and tailed with trips to Rome. In March, as the blossom unfurled along the Tiber and…

Until a few years ago, Pakistan was one of the most dangerous countries on earth. The tribal areas in the…

All too often in life there’s a gap between expectation and reality. Not with driving on ice. The expectation is…

I’m standing in milady’s boudoir, a room which would have delighted Liberace. Here, nothing is de trop and everything is…

We are told we live in a ‘post-truth’ world. This appears to mean that everyone believes everything they are told…

Supremely exciting The nation awaits with bated breath the decision of the Supreme Court on whether the government can exercise…

Every year, from mid-November to mid-January, dozens of DVDs drop through my letterbox. These are most of the movie releases…

From ‘Engage the enemy more closely!’, The Spectator, 30 December 1916: Britain was never more vigorous than she is now:…

It is said that the case for freedom of expression needs to be restated in every generation, but things move…

Unencumbered Sir: Matthew Parris’s bizarre reference (‘Unforgiven’, 10 December) to the UK economy as merely ‘medium-sized’ is a classic instance…

Home The Queen was said by the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg to have asked, at a private lunch before June’s referendum,…

Most of my predictions for 2016 were wrong; so let’s not revisit them. But I was right, in January, to…

I’ve been looking at my predictions for 2016 made this time last year. It’s extraordinary — don’t check, just trust…

I bought a record in a second-hand shop in the summer of 1981. A double album. I made sure nobody…

Did you know that 190 out of 200 nations in the world have either red or blue on their flags?…

Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the…

Most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. So we’re told. Frits van Egters apparently leads a life more desperate…

There has never previously, I believe, been a novel about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, one of the 17th century’s…

When George Omona first saw soldiers in the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army, he was amazed. The scary fighters who had…

‘The Birds is coming’ screamed the posters for Tippi Hedren’s only famous film. Well, the cats is coming in her…

‘Light as a feather, free as a bird.’ Günter Grass starts this final volume of short prose, poetry and sketches…

For much of 1517 Michelangelo Buonarroti was busy quarrying marble in the mountains near Carrara. From time to time, however,…

A Monster Calls is a fantasy drama about a young boy whose life is crap, basically. His mother is sick.…

Gerald Barry loved playing organ for Protestants as they allowed him a lie in. Then they found out he wasn’t…

It’s been a turbulent year, and not just in the outside world. Inside radio, digital is changing not just when…

As you’ve probably noticed, TV critics spend a lot of their time trying to identify which other programmes the one…

Buried Child is a typical Sam Shepard play. The main character, Dodge, is a brain-damaged alcoholic cripple stuck in a…

Soon after the Norman Conquest of England (1066 and all that) Count Roger Hauteville of Normandy took control of Sicily.…

Q. Our first Christmas card arrived on 2 December and it was a lovely thing — a Burne-Jones angel musician,…

There are an awful lot of bridge babies in the world — that is, babies born to mothers so addicted…

Probably the most spectacular game played in the past year was the brilliant win by Gawain Jones in the Olympiad.…

White to play and win. This is a position from Caruana-Kramnik, Leuven 2016. Answers to me at The Spectator by…

In Competition No. 2977 you were invited to submit a selection of meaningless, pseudo-profound statements. Bullshit was defined in a…

Clockwise round the grid from 11 run three trios (8,4,6,5,9,3,5,8,4), each trio combining to suggest the same word. A trio…

Unclued lights are names of PARLIAMENTS.  First prize Judith Bevis, NewportRunners-up Hilda Ball, Belfast; Michael Grocott, Loughborough

I first ate at the London version of Harry’s Bar in the early 1990s. Back then, Jeffrey Archer and I…

What a great year this has been, what a good mood I’m in, why, it’s almost like being in love.…

New Year’s Day is the most depressing of holidays. It doesn’t celebrate anyone or anything worth celebrating. It simply marks…

I drew back the curtains. Yet another absolutely still, sunny day. Early-morning mist lying in the valleys. An echoing report…

Here are the first 50 words in the order that they were learnt by a child called Will: 1 uh-oh;…

What a fraught, divisive, infuriating sort of year it’s been. It started with me attempting to go on a blind…

And so it begins again. This time last year, I decided to see how long I could last without alcohol.…

Controversial I know, but I feel a little sympathy for Tomasz Kroker, the lorry driver jailed for ten years for…