The Spectator
Australia
Sco Mo, the Chamberlain of the culture wars
During the second world war, a group of English-speaking Japanese female radio broadcasters, collectively known as ‘Tokyo Rose’, spread Japanese…
Australian Columnists
Brown Study
The Spectator Australia Diplomatic Research Unit has laboured away in secret for years on projects too sensitive to mention in…
Australian Features
They are spitting in our face
China has no problem with flouting international rules and laws
Playing politics with mental health
The Productivity Commission’s report misses the mark
Features
Cricket tea
Cricket is not renowned for embracing change. The introduction of the middle stump, overarm bowling and Kevin Pietersen were all…
The Week
Swear words
Freed from the bonds of the European Union, Britain is now in a position to sign whatever trade deal it…
Portrait of the Week
Home The Commons voted by 291 votes to 78 for new coronavirus regulations putting 55 million people in England into…
High and dry
Does it matter that Debenhams and the Arcadia group have gone under this week, taking 25,000 jobs with them and…
Columnists
The Tavistock is a national scandal
How noble of the British Library to have apologised to the family of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes for…
Green will be remembered only as a nasty stain on capitalism
There really isn’t much left to be said about Sir Philip Green as his Arcadia fashion empire collapses into administration,…
The Spectator’s Notes
My inbox is crowded with messages from Old Etonians attacking Simon Henderson, the headmaster of Eton. They are furious that…
Goodbye to all that
On Saturday night we sat around the kitchen table, my family and I, and had a takeaway from the Turkish…
China needs to make reparations
It is time we started to talk about reparations. I am not of course referring to the demands made by…
Can Boris win round his rebel MPs?
The beginning of the end for Theresa May was when she tried to see if she could pass her Brexit…
Books
In the land of the blind
Carter William Page, born in 1971, is the former United States Navy officer with personal, business, scholarly and government connections…
A macabre legend
The problem with telling stories about Harvard is that Harvard, if it teaches anything these days, teaches distrust of stories.…
Reliving the golden moment
What caught my eye towards the end of Look Again was this conversation between David Bailey and the shoe designer…
Bright and beautiful
When he was a student, the celebrated American modernist master Robert Rauschenberg once told me that his ‘greatest teacher’ —…
In the same boat
‘We should be living in a brave country and on a brave planet that bravely distributes its occupants,’ thinks Rose…
Of human bondage
Wrestling with the history of the British Empire is the unfinished and unfinishable project of our history. Time’s Monster takes…
The greater glory of Roy
Stephen Bayley recalls his (mainly enjoyable) encounters with the flamboyant former museum director
Arts
Gary Garrels
Let me take you down the strange rabbit hole of contemporary art museum culture. The senior curator of painting and…
Richard Tognetti
There’s no doubt about the Australian Chamber Orchestra; full of confidence it is sailing into 2021 with its most ambitious…
This will hurt
County Lines is the kind of social realism that the British do so well, if not too well. In other…
Victorian values
Blackeyed Theatre is another victim of the virus. Its production of Jane Eyrewas midway through a UK tour, and due…
AC/DC: Power Up
Grade: C The fear is this: you’re wearing a leather jacket and hipster jeans and think you look cool, but…
About Schmidt
The sounds that Franz Schmidt made while learning the trumpet were pretty much unbearable, or so the story goes. In…
Spotted dick and custard
I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue has just been voted the greatest radio comedy of all time by Radio Times,…
The great awakening
Congratulations, everyone! It turns out we’re much better than those bigoted old Brits of the 1950s. After all, they were…
Life
Kiwi Life / Language
David Cohen I often used to ask myself what the ultimate secret is of playing great chess, and I suppose…
Backchat
In Competition No. 3177 you were invited to submit a well-known fictional person’s view of their author. Highlights in a…
A battle for Eton’s soul
When trying to get my head around the row that has engulfed Eton College in the past two weeks I…
Roots of happiness
Turnips is an haute cuisine restaurant inside a greengrocer in Borough Market in London. I suspect others will try this…
Strange
‘Forget coronavirus,’ said my husband, ‘the word of the year is strange.’ The strange thing is he’s right. This wasn’t…
Solution to 2483: In my soup
Unclued lights are anagrams of animals: PRAENOMINA (1A: Pomeranian), MARTIAN (18: tamarin), LARBOARD (21: Labrador), SHORE (28: horse), PROTEIN (42:…
Chess improvement
The juicy prospect of improvement constantly dangles above a chess player. Those morsels of knowledge one has acquired whet the…
2486: Ghost companions
In this anniversary year, unclued lights (one of two words) are of a kind. Ignore four accents. Across 1 Regularly…
Puzzle no. 633
White to play. A position taken from Chess Improvement (perhaps from Luchowski–Gridnew, Moscow 1992.) Black’s menacing pieces make the situation…
Rugby must try harder
Remember those lazy, hazy, crazy days of last year’s rugby World Cup, when as perfect a performance by England as…






































































