The law is straightforward. If you denigrate or demean the work of a Royal Commission, or indeed a Royal Commissioner,…

I had never met the Minister for Finance in NSW, Dominic Perrottet, and knew little about him when I went…

Old industry cities get shafted Is it something in the water in Newcastle and Ipswich? Both cities grew from coal,…

The great reform summit has just ended and, as I predicted, was a complete waste of time. There were a…

On the eve of Germany’s reunification we were in the East German countryside and lunched in the small town of…

The Republican movement are up to their old tricks

Thanks to the intolerant orthodoxies of the Left, ordinary conservative Australians are now moral larrikins

Now that the economy’s all done and dusted, it’s time to focus on the really important stuff - like an Oz Republic

Our approach to de-radicalising would-be terrorists is worthy of Monty Python

His imminent victory could lock in 20 years of Conservative rule – of a kind the Tory right might not enjoy

The purges might go on for years

The run-up to the leadership election finds the shadow home secretary in a surprisingly cheerful mood

The national puzzle is this: why did so many informed and sensible people accept transparent twaddle as fact?

For nearly 20 years, all my summers came at once. And then my luck ran out

The first year of Kings College London Mathematics School has proved the value of specialisation – and the risks of regulation overkill

As Britain’s first European Green Capital, my beloved, once-bohemian city is going all-in on pettifogging regulations

Even tech entrepreneurs find the new world of oversharing hard to master. Perhaps we all need carnival masks

This is a great city – and a small town where a thrown plate of lasagne can resonate for years

The second Elizabethan age has been an era of achievement – and the Queen deserves a significant share of the credit

Home The Government decided after all to retain the rules preventing ministers and their departments from publishing campaign material, ‘with…

Plus: Edmund de Waal studies; the British Ceramics Biennial; and Liz Kendall

Plus: Sexual offences on trains; biggest yachts; Facebook figures

Rome’s plebs knew what they wanted – and got it. Do we need the MP for Islington North to tell us?

From ‘War bonuses’, The Spectator, 4 September 1915: War means a demand for human muscle… At the moment the brain-worker is…

Plus: cowardly Frenchmen; hair politics; and the crisis marketing crisis

Plus: the paedophile hunt is beyond satire; Germany redeemed; and a nightmare about the Pope

The movement which is about to foist Corbyn on the Labour party is the same one that bullies the rest of the country

If, as I believe, the main difficulty that faces us in deciding moral duty is the difficulty of prioritising, our national religion is profoundly unhelpful

Unreleased documents are never, ever as exciting as you think they will be

Plus: the unstoppable Howard Davies; sad news from Tokyo; stories from the Spectator cruise

Peter Parker reviews Elegy by Andrew Roberts, a necessarily bloody account of the first day on the Somme

Lewis Jones reviews Jay Parini’s Every Time a Friend Succeeds Something Inside Me Dies

Andrew Taylor reviews Arcadia by Iain Pears, with a little help from the novel’s iPhone app

Jochen Bleicken’s biography comes to praise the first emperor, not to bury him, finds Harry Mount

Alex Clark reviews Andrew Miller’s The Crossing, where lurks the most enigmatic heroine

Jack Castle reviews Francis Bacon in Your Blood: A Memoir by Michael Peppiatt

Jonathan Sumption reviews Christopher Tyerman’s How to Plan a Crusade

Ethnic and gender quotas are fast becoming the norm in the performing arts - but they shouldn’t be

Peter Phillips on his not entirely successful attempts to persuade orchestral conductors to take on the great choral masterpieces of the Renaissance

From palpable sculpture to painterly textiles, Claudia Massie explores three new shows at the Henry Moore Institute, The Hepworth and Dovecot Studios

The moment of enlightenment came during Amanda Foreman’s chastening new history documentary The Ascent of Woman on BBC2

Plus: a misguided attempt to adapt Alasdair Gray’s sci-fi epic, Lanark, for the stage and a superb concert from the Zehetmair Quartet

Plus: a Henry V at Temple Church that can be seen but not heard

Val the housekeeper, played by Regine Chase, is dynamite from the very first frame

Plus: the poetry emerging from the rubble of the Syrian civil war

Once preview tickets are on sale the customer has a right to information about the goods being offered

It is not possible to imagine classical ballet without the music of Tchaikovsky. The scores of his three full length…

But the camaraderie of the first Spectator cruise was marvellous

All misplaced - a great time was had by all

I found a policeman who actually helped me deal with the theft of a saddle - amazing!

Thousands of Londoners died in the Blitz; twice as many Americans are killed every year in gun-related incidents

My wife enjoyed a trip to Windsor with some racing novice friends

No doubt you have heard about the huge cheating storm that has blown up over the last 10 days. Here…

England’s top grandmaster, Michael Adams, exerts a powerful influence over the elite player David Navara. In rating terms Navara and…

Black to play. This position is a variation from Maslak-Smerdon, Pardubice 2007. Black has powered through on the kingside. How…

In Competition No. 2913 you were invited to submit an extract from the school report of a well-known author, living or…

The unclued lights (one of two words and another hyphened) can be arranged to form a word pyramid of 3…

The unclued lights (paired at 14/38. 23/17 and 34/2) are SPECTATOR journalists or contributors. First prize Dr David Jerwood, Keighley,…

I annoy her so much I fear she may poison me

Plus: the giants of rugby and their splendidly incongruous digs

Plus: I caught an acquaintance stealing a child’s treasures

Mum’s has a faintly political manifesto on its menu, which could have been written by Mr Greedy from the Mr Men, with help from Noam Chomsky

Al-Jazeera wants to banish stigma by banning the word. It will struggle