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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

The year that woke broke

The year 2024 will go down in the history books as the year in which Donald Trump triumphed over the…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

The spirit of Christmas came to me last week in a very real but unexpected way. I had given myself…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Following Enron’s playbook

Labor plays hide and seek with the debt and deficit

Features Australia

Workplace follies

Labor regulations are driving businesses broke or offshore

Features Australia

Socialism: the grift that keeps on taking

Australians must recognise the ‘enemy within’

Features Australia

Yada yada yada

Jim Chalmers is Australia’s answer to Kamala Harris

Features Australia

Looking forward and back

2025 will be a good year in the US, Canada and Australia

Features Australia

Twin tragedies

Lessons were learned but the heroes must be recognised

Features Australia

All tail and no dog

Labor has drifted a long way from its working-class roots

Features Australia

Decline and fall in Victoria

Brad Battin has his work cut out to make Melbourne marvellous again

Features Australia

Enemies foreign and domestic

Both Trump and Hegseth have them in their sights

Features

Features

How real is your ADHD?

Why does everyone suddenly seem to have ADHD? It’s a question that many of us working in mental health have…

Features

Right move: will Britain benefit from the global conservative turn?

The world appears to be turning on its axis – and moving hard to the right. The New World is tilting hardest.…

Notes on...

The unwritten rules of visitors books

Two things come to mind when I think about visitors books. The first is the memory of leaving the home…

Features

The Vodou kingpin behind Haiti’s latest massacre

For a politician known for his ability to shock, Donald Trump managed to outdo himself with his baseless claim during…

Features

The Christian case for hunting

When I was a teenager, my closest friend, Henry, would vanish into the Shropshire Hills over the hunting season’s weekends.…

Features

‘I’m a new kind of Christian’: Jordan Peterson on faith, family and the future of the right

Professor Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist, author and commentator whose latest book, We Who Wrestle with God, is about…

Features

‘They don’t want me to rise again’: China’s gene-editing scientist on why he’s back in the lab

Before he agrees to be interviewed, He Jiankui has one request: that he is introduced as a ‘gene editing pioneer’.…

The Week

Leading article

The growing wealth gap between Britain and the US

New year predictions are always rash, but it feels as though one aspect of the story of 2025 can already…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: Reform’s rising membership, peerages and an 11lb puffball

Home Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, said that the party now had more members than the Conservatives. On…

Diary

I’m not the only football-obsessed composer

I was in Sweden a few weeks ago, where my music was presented in Stockholm in the most recent International…

Letters

Letters: Where to find the best negroni

Free thinking Sir: Your leading article (‘Article of faith’, 14 December) appears to have forgotten the connection between rationalism and…

Ancient and modern

Lessons for Keir Starmer from Cicero

The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, and his chosen Attorney-General, Baron Hermer, both professional lawyers, seem to take the view…

Columnists

Columns

Is Reform unstoppable?

Lying in bed pissed on Boxing Day night, I was visited by the ghost of Christmas Future, dressed in a…

Columns

Rachel Reeves’s new year’s resolution

On Christmas Day, 12 million people watched the will-they-won’t-they couple Smithy and Nessa finally marry after 17 years in the…

Columns

The nightmare of ‘maladaptive daydreaming’

At the beginning of the spring term of my second year at university, a French boy called Xavier looked up…

Any other business

My business predictions for 2025

Headed for ‘the worst of all worlds’ is not where any of us would wish to find ourselves at the…

Books

More from Books

Menacing masterpieces: Voices of the Fallen Heroes and Other Stories, by Yukio Mishima

Of the collection’s 14 mesmerising tales, two in particular stand out: a hallucination of nuclear apocalypse and a requiem for Japan’s war dead

More from Books

Bad air days: Savage Theories, by Pola Oloixarac, reviewed

University students immersed in drug-and-group-sex and online gaming reveal the dark side of Buenos Aires

More from Books

Has the term ‘racist’ become devalued through overuse?

Quite possibly. But racism remains all too real today – even though half the British population deny it exists

More from Books

Rumpelstiltskin retold: Alive in the Merciful Country, by A.L. Kennedy, reviewed

A group of idealistic activists is betrayed by a charismatic newcomer who dazzles with skill and charm – and gets away with murder. Repeatedly

More from Books

‘You can really sing!’ – Sonny discovers the teenage Cher

The moment Sonny heard the voice of the girl he employed as a cleaner, both their fortunes changed – and two years later the couple would be greeted by 5,000 screaming fans in New York

More from Books

‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur

Sir Bernard Mandeville certainly revelled in mischief-making; but his one simple idea – that human beings are animals – seems unremarkable today

More from Books

The intensity of female friendship explored

Rachel Cooke’s spry anthology includes fiction, poetry, memoir, speeches, obituaries, letters and even comics – The Four Marys from Bunty

Lead book review

Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers

The brilliant physicist’s warning to her contemporaries not to carry respect for great men to the point of idolatry fell on deaf ears

Arts

Australian Arts

Summer Reading

There are a thousand ways of celebrating the Christmas holiday that are culture specific but have a universal appeal. You…

Classical

Our verdict on Pappano’s first months at the London Symphony Orchestra

Sir Antonio Pappano began 2024 as music director of the Royal Opera and ended as chief conductor of the London…

Exhibitions

A dreamy, if overly ambitious show: Silk Roads, at the British Museum, reviewed

Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among…

The Listener

The real best album of last year

Grade: A+ In a desperate wish to avoid the appellation of a derided genre, this young man from Asheville, North…

Theatre

Brutal and brilliant portrait of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford

The Last Days of Liz Truss? is a one-woman show about the brief interregnum between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak.…

Theatre

A miracle at the RSC: genuinely funny Shakespeare

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Most subsidised theatres hanker for…

Television

No one will convince me that Keira Knightley can fight: Black Doves reviewed

If your heart sinks at the prospect of a thriller series starring Keira Knightley as a highly trained undercover agent…

Cinema

Fools will love it: We Live in Time reviewed

We Live in Time is a rom-com (of sorts), starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. They have terrific chemistry and…

Arts feature

How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution

The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

Like many Speccie readers I was shocked by the public expressions of anti-Semitism which blighted the closing months of 2024.…

Aussie Life

Language

The verb ‘to unsee’ turns up as a snappy, or trendy, way of saying that something is unforgettable—in a bad…

The turf

Hurrah for Constitution Hill

Hallelujah, he’s back. What we needed to take racing’s attention off the miseries of inadequate prize money, shrinking attendances and…

Real life

My run-in with the GP receptionist

‘We don’t have an appointment for you!’ yelled the woman sitting behind the reception hatch. My 87-year-old father stared back…

Best life

The hell of bra shopping

It’s probably haram to quote Cecil Rhodes these days, but he was bang on when he said: ‘Remember that you…

Sport

Could Thomas Tuchel be the one?

You would have to be living a very sheltered life not to have noticed that the Premier League this season…

Food

Not worth its salt: Wingmans reviewed

I see this column as an essay on cultural polarisation: artisanal butter can only take you so far into wisdom.…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Can I regift an unwanted tin of sweets?

Q. A kind villager gave us a jolly circular tin of sweets for Christmas. We are both overweight and would…

No sacred cows

Can I be cancelled twice?

One of the biggest regrets of my life was saying yes when Jo Johnson asked if I wanted to be…