The Spectator
5 May 2018 Aus
The Parisites
Australia
Battle fronts
Australia sits at a critical crossroads, where the damage from the Left’s long march through all our institutions can either…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
One of the oddest under-classes of Melbourne society are the people who write letters to the Age. Not the main…
Australian diary
The frustrating reality of public life is that there’s usually a lot less to show for it than the headlines…
Australian Features
Business/Robbery etc
So what’s new? Twenty years ago, Westpac’s then boss, Bob Joss proclaimed: ‘Banks face shutting down entire divisions of business…
Australia under attack from political correctness
Douglas Murray in The Strange Death Of Europe argues that ‘Europe is committing suicide’ as a result of enemies within…
Potty Greens
The push for recreational cannabis legalisation in Australia has recently received energetic support from Dr Di Natale and his band…
The Parisites
Last month it was two years since world leaders converged with self-congratulatory ceremony and chilled champagne to sign the multi…
Murphy’s lore
Murphy – the Australian Ballet’s tribute to choreographer Graeme Murphy, surely their brightest star – kicks off with a scene…
Dark truth behind white lies
If we look at the former British colonies of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa, we can see several…
Save Liddell or let Abbott do it
Responsible for Australia having the world’s most expensive electricity and gas, the least thing the Turnbull government could do is…
Features
Mayday! How Theresa May has been trapped by her enemies and her friends
The European Union might have many flaws, but one of its great strengths is its ability to sense weakness. It…
The Windrush debacle is not as straightforward as it seems
The idea that left vs right has been replaced by open vs closed is one of the most self-serving conceits…
Why China’s happy couples are spending thousands to stand by Big Ben
If you’ve walked by the red telephone boxes on Parliament Square, chances are you have seen an Asian couple in…
The Catholic Church is absent in Ireland’s abortion referendum
The Irish referendum on abortion takes place in just under three weeks’ time, and while the polls suggest a hefty…
Diary of a revolution: Paris 1968, through the eyes of Nancy Mitford
In May 1968, civil unrest, bordering on revolution, exploded on to the streets of Paris. Student protesters and striking workers…
Good grief: Death isn’t something you just get over
Just over a year ago, my best friend dropped dead. He was in his early sixties and many of us…
Welcome to Matlock Bath, the ‘Switzerland of Derbyshire’
Revisiting cherished childhood memories can be dispiriting; everything appears diminished and one leaves questioning the nature of perception. Were we…
The Week
The power of Momentum: the right have underestimated the power behind Corbyn
The local elections have thrown up a paradox. In theory, Britain has never had more devolution: we have assemblies in…
In defence of Olly Robbins
After reading Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows, Somerset Maugham remarked: ‘That young man holds the future of the English novel…
Portrait of the week: Brexit, Windrush resignations and the march of the toxic moth
Home The prospect of Brexit in name only hovered on the horizon as the government contemplated an association agreement with…
Barometer: The top four worst microphone gaffes
Is this thing on? Sainsbury’s Chief Executive Mike Coupe was recorded singing ‘We’re in the Money’ as he prepared to…
Transgenderism and the Iliad
A couple of weeks ago a reader (Emma Lyons) queried Taki, the High Life professor of ancient Greek culture and…
Letters: Rod Liddle is right, Toby Young is wrong and Bruce Anderson must stop
Campaign for real cricket Sir: Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s splendid article ‘Cricket, unlovely cricket’ (28 April) remonstrated against the threat to Test…
Columnists
Egalité! Liberté! Sexualité! The trivial demands behind the 1968 French ‘revolution’
This ‘Windrush’ story comes from a friend called Michael McKay, a British broadcaster based in Geneva. His father, Jeff, a…
The UN’s sent an envoy to examine Brexit racism. And a warm welcome to her
Another new word, this time from the deranged far-right: incel. This means a chap who is involuntarily celibate because women…
After decades in London, I still long for home. Is that too Brexity?
As I get older, and particularly after having a child, I feel myself unexpectedly drawn back to the countryside I…
We don’t deserve capitalism
Next time there’s a terrorist atrocity in Britain, here’s one of the things that will happen in the immediate aftermath:…
TSB’s new owners should have seen this computer catastrophe coming
The systems breakdown at TSB is not (yet) the worst UK bank computer cock-up of all time: that prize is…
Books
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
The songs my father’s mistress taught me ignited my love of France
When John Julius Norwich was a boy, his father was British ambassador in Paris.School holidays were spent in the exceptionally…
The best single-volume history of the Great War yet written
The historiography of the Great War is stupendous, the effects of the conflict being so far-reaching that even today historians…
The splendour and squalor surrounding the Sun King
The château at Versailles remained the grandest palace in the whole of Europe from the moment that Louis XIV established…
Zen tales and flights of fancy: Patient X reviewed
The target audience for David Peace’s new novel appears almost defiantly niche. Certainly, any readers in the embarrassing position of…
Arlott and Swanton — the Disraeli and Gladstone of cricket?
E.W. Swanton’s first published article appeared in All Sports Weekly in July 1926, soon after his 19th birthday. Thence, swiftly,…
Root and branch: Richard Powers is determined to save the world’s trees
This is a novel about trees, written in the shape of a tree (eight introductory background chapters, called ‘Roots’; a…
Knickerbocker glories: feminism, fashion and the bicycle
One September day the 16-year-old Tessie Reynolds got on her bike. In a homemade suit, she pedalled from London to…
The ordeal of being married (twice) to John Bellany
Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013)…
The futile gang wars of New York
I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging…
The long arm of the Russian super mafia
Mark Galeotti’s study of Russian organised crime, the product of three decades of academic research and consultancy work, is more…
Couldn’t Diana Evans’s fretful couples just shut up and deal with it?
My husband started reading Diana Evans’s third novel, Ordinary People, the day after I’d finished it. Three days later, I…
The misery of policing the US–Mexico border
Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…
Who needs Jordan Petersen when we have Ferdinand Mount?
You will by now doubtless be familiar with the University of Toronto academic Jordan Peterson. He’s the unlikely YouTube star…
The London painters that conquered the world
This is an important, authoritative work of art criticism that recognises schools of painters, yet displays the superior distinctions of…
The young Descartes: I fought, therefore I thought
Descartes is most generally known these days for being the guy who was sure he existed because he was thinking.…
Leaving Mangoland
When Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, irascible US comedian Lewis Black declared angrily that, thanks to that event,…
Arts
How Riccardo Chailly brought joy – and Italian opera – back to La Scala
As the curtain opens on the second act of Don Pasquale, I hear a rustle of discomfort. Donizetti’s opera has…
Is PewDiePie the new Harold Bloom?
The most subscribed to channel on YouTube — by far — belongs to a rather strange young Swede named Felix…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
From now on you can assume that every TV-drama cast is female-led
From time to time, a TV show comes along which is so thrillingly original, so wildly imaginative, that you can’t…
Law & Order, made – and banned – in 1978, puts most recent crime series in the shade
It’s not every day that a television screenwriter is threatened with a trial for sedition, but G.F. Newman was after…
Lean on Pete is a beauty
Andrew Haigh makes inaction films. Weekend (2011) tells of two young homosexuals getting to know each other in Nottingham. In…
No one can beat Mary Cassatt at painting mothers and children
A lady licking an envelope. An intimate thing. It might be only the bill from the coal-man she’s paying, but…
A dated and remote two-hour polemic basking in #MeToo topicality: The Writer reviewed
Ella Hickson’s last play at the Almeida was a sketch show about oil. Her new effort uses the same episodic…
Marta Dusseldorp
Nora walks out and shuts the door behind her; shuts the door on her children, her husband, her life to…
Life
The rise – and rise – of Trump Derangement Syndrome
New York ‘What do we do with these men?’ thundered a New York Times headline. It was followed by a…
On giving and taking offence
‘Slight prick,’ she said. The nurses all say that before they slide the needle in the upstanding vein in the…
Why suburban ladies really play tennis
Because my mother is always telling me everything will be all right if I join a tennis club, I’ve joined…
Tripping in the African bush
Laikipia, Kenya Neighbours Tom and Jo came by with a bucketful of wild African mushrooms, which they had collected in…
no. 504
White to play. This is a possible variation from Meier-Carlsen, Grenke 2018. Meier could have forced a win in this…
First and last
In Competition No. 3046 you were invited to supply a poem beginning with the last line of any well-known poem…
2357: Half a Drum
Unclued lights make five pairs with something in common. Across 1 Fragrant nuts announced (5) 4 Neat workers secure…
to 2354: Pioneering
Parts indicated in clues in italics must each BREAK NEW GROUND (1A 4A), creating entries at 6, 13, 26, 39…
Here’s what every incel needs: a sex robot
In a recent blogpost, an American economics professor called Robin Hanson asked why it is that income inequality is regarded…
English cricket’s new tournament already looks doomed
Difficult to know quite what to make of The Hundred, which has the feel of being knocked up on the…
Dear Mary: A work colleague has a brain tumour — and his self pity is annoying me
Q. When buying a present for a friend, I would not dream of glugging from the bottle or helping myself…
It reeks of Alan Clark and the 1980s but all is forgiven for the food: Le Gavroche reviewed
Le Gavroche is named for ‘the urchin’ in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and lives in a basement on Upper Brook…
Terf wars and the ludicrous lexicon of feminist theory
Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited…












































































