The Spectator
31 March 2018 Aus
Resurrection unlikely
Australia
Resurrection unlikely
Could there be a better time of year than this for the Australian cricket team to decide to crucify themselves,…
Australian Columnists
Simon Collins
Like many Australians I was greatly affected by the news that James Packer has decided he is not well enough…
Australian notes
On tour with Jordan I got the phone call back in January. The man on the other end of the…
Russian diary
On the Russian Presidential Polling Day Sunday, I departed Tullamarine at dawn with a fierce hot northerly blowing, already plus…
Cricket notes
From little sins big sins grow The Australian cricket team are a bunch of cheats. There is no other way…
Home & away notes
Over the space of a decade or so, a number of young Australians managed to bring themselves forcefully to international…
Australian Features
Time to rise again
I bought a different brand of diary for this year, and it has dropped Easter. Easter Day is plain Sunday…
Telford and the Left
The sleepy town of Telford, England, is home to the latest bout of grooming gangs and child sexual exploitation. On…
Save the last dance for Li
As a child growing up in rural China during the punishing years of the Cultural Revolution, Li Cunxin felt like…
Aux bien pensants
Mug the frugal, turnbull teaches shorten The standing of politicians has never been lower. They’re widely regarded as self-interested, incompetent,…
Features
How to rig an election
Andrés Sepúlveda sleeps behind bombproof doors in a maximum-security prison in central Bogota, Colombia. When travelling to judicial hearings or…
Revealed: Cambridge Analytica and the Passport King
The Cambridge Analytica story is full of hot air. Everybody delights in talking about how scary Facebook is, and lots…
When will the West take a stand on the persecution of Muslims?
Anti-Christian persecution, for so long a great untold story, has started to gain the world’s attention. But the suffering of…
Why my generation is indifferent to anti-Semitism
It took a protest of Jews in Westminster for Jeremy Corbyn to own up to the Labour party’s problem with…
A tale of two Sarahs: the cuddly bishop vs the terrifying cardinal
If you’re looking for a snapshot of the state of global Christianity today, a good place to start would be…
I averted the wrath of the students by telling them I’d had a sex change
I went to Australia with my constant companion Hilary, the only woman in England I’m not paying alimony to. She…
Monet painted London not brick-by-brick, but light-by-shade
The Savoy was too sumptuous, complained Claude Monet, returning to the hotel in 1904. His rooms — one for sleeping,…
The Week
Theresa May has shown Putin that the West can still unite
After Britain voted to leave the European Union, there was much mistaken talk about how it might also move away…
Portrait of the week: 23 countries back Britain by expelling Russian diplomats
Home ‘We recognise that anti-Semitism has occurred in pockets within the Labour Party,’ Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, said. ‘I…
Tristram Hunt’s diary: Work and play on the Persian Gulf
On the gently lapping shores of the Persian Gulf, in the steely shadow of the Burj Khalifa, I bump into…
German manoeuvres
From ‘The great battle’, 30 March 1918: Since our last issue by far the greatest battle of the war has…
How do you make a cricket ball swing?
Not cricket The Australian cricket captain Steve Smith was banned for a match and fined his match fee after a…
Australian letters
Dark days Sir: David Dilley (Letters, 17 March) suggests ‘co-operation between local communities and enlightened landowners’ might assist in the…
Columnists
At last, Labour’s anti-Semitism has caught up with Corbyn
At last Jeremy Corbyn is being made to pay a price for Labour’s anti-Semitism under his leadership. It has now, for…
What will it take for Labour MPs to act against Corbyn?
One of the mistakes Theresa May made in calling an early election was not anticipating the effect it would have…
All was calm at the elephant safari camp. Then the river began to roar…
When Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, ejected from the aeroplane he was flying solo to Scotland, he parachuted to the ground…
Labour, lizards and the problem of anti-Semitism
There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age…
Can you prove you’re not a racist?
After an essay in this month’s Prospect about literature and freedom of speech, it seems I was cited on Twitter…
So farewell Toys ‘R’ Us, the predator that became the prey
I remember the arrival of Toys ‘R’ Us in Britain, because as a young banker in 1984 I was tasked…
Books
How Christianity saw off its rivals and became the universal church
In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course…
Think of five things you use daily that weren’t made in a factory
Industrial factories huddle at the very edge of our world view. Most of us have never visited one, but we…
Cockney comfort food: eel, pie and mash to the sound of Bow bells
Cockney feet mark the beat of history, sang Noël Coward, as if he had ever been east of Holborn. Yet…
First wife, enduring love: the passionate affair of John Osborne and Pamela Lane
Look Back in Anger, John Osborne’s 1956 play, was a fertile cultural seedbed: out of it sprouted the Angry Young…
Are the French right to be obsessed with their Gaulish ancestry?
This book reminded me of Kurt Andersen’s Fantasyland — but where Andersen thinks only Americans have lost their minds, David…
Who knew that Arabic has more than 30 words for wine?
You know you’re in good hands when the dedication reads: ‘To the writers, drinkers and freethinkers of the Arab and…
False confessions to murder in 1970s Iceland
Everyone in Iceland has heard of Gudmunder and Geirfinnur. They were two (unrelated) men who disappeared in 1974, albeit ten…
I’m in danger of becoming a flat-mind bore
Reading The Mind is Flat is like watching The Truman Show and realising, while you’re watching it, that you are…
Love and loneliness prevail in the latest short stories
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection Her Body & Other Parties (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99) takes a confident straddle across speculative fiction,…
Simplicius Simplicissimus and the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War
On 23 May 1618, Bohemian Protestants pushed two Catholic governors and their secretary through the windows of Prague Castle, in…
Wilder still and wilder
Hello! Hello! Hello! What have we here? What we have is the new Plant – the sixth – from Michael…
Arts
The loveliest episode of Holy Week – Christ rises from the potting shed
In Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Noli Me Tangere’ (1653) Christ stands with his heel on a spade. He appears, in his rough…
How Debussy slipped past Wagner into the unknown
A spectre haunted the first weekend of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s Debussy Festival: the spectre of Richard Wagner.…
It was good but I preferred slurping my genitals: Deborah’s dog reviews Isle of Dogs
The latest film from Wes Anderson is a doggy animation set in a fantasy Japan and as there was a…
The glorious history of Chatham Dockyard, as told through the eyes of artists
‘Ding, Clash, Dong, BANG, Boom, Rattle, Clash, BANG, Clink, BANG, Dong, BANG, Clatter, BANG BANG BANG!’ is how Charles Dickens…
Paradise Lost is made for radio – but you need to concentrate
It’s a tough listen, Paradise Lost on Radio 4 at the weekend. In bold defiance of the demands of a…
At last, a great achievement at the Royal Opera: Macbeth reviewed
At last, a great time at the Royal Opera: a magnificent performance, in every way, of Verdi’s Macbeth, curiously but…
The Plough and the Stars at the Lyric Hammersmith shows Sean O’Casey is one of the greats
The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey looks at the Irish nationalist movement during the events of Easter 1916.…
Thank you, West Midlands, for the blind alley of heavy metal – blues without rhythm, wit or soul
They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one…
The genius of This Country
Sometimes — really not often but sometimes — a programme that’s good and honest and true slips under the wire…
Kathryn Stott
It may not be paradise in every respect, but Townsville in mid-winter could be a reasonable approximation. The Australian Festival…
Life
The truth about Prince Charles
Gstaad At dinner the other night a friend wondered what came first, social climbing or name-dropping? It’s obviously a very…
The black art of acting
I go to the theatre but rarely because I am overpowered by even mediocre acting and find it exhausting. Theatre…
I’m being spied on in my bedroom by a drone
The sound of something hideous woke me in the dead of night, and I shot out of bed. I looked…
It was ladies first at Cheltenham
At soggy Newbury last Saturday racegoers were still reliving memories of an epic Cheltenham Festival. ‘Were you there for that…
Victor Ludorum
A match which has attracted less attention than it deserves was Luke McShane’s victory over David Howell in the final…
no. 499
White to play. This position is from a later game in the match, McShane-Howell, London 2017. How did White conclude…
Creative spark
In Competition No. 3041, to mark the centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark, you were invited to submit a…
2352: Upright Characters
Of the unclued entries, three combine to form a phrase (five words) describing three more (four foreign-language words). The remaining…
to 2349: Novel
The novel was HOWARDS END by E.M. Forster. Round the perimeter run the characters LEONARD BAST, PERCY CAHILL, MARGARET SCHLEGEL…
Genetics and the truth about private schools
A paper published last week in an academic journal called npj Science of Learning attracted an unusual amount of press…
Had 533 people voted differently, the Tories would have a full majority
Nine years ago, before Cambridge Analytica existed, I caught wind of a research project at Cambridge involving the online measurement…
Dear Mary: How to get out of a neighbours’ dinner party invite?
Q. A couple who live directly opposite us in London have sent a save-the-date notice for a big party they…
When it comes to food and wine, there’s no place like Rhône
As often, a good glass stimulated good talk. We were drinking some promising young Rhônes and the discussion ranged wide,…
Word of the week: dot
With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon…
