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The Spectator

5 September 2020 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Victoria’s illiberal democracy

With the acquiescence of a handful of well-intentioned but misguided crossbench MPs, Victorian Labor Premier Daniel Andrews has won his…

Australian Columnists

Brown Study

Brown study

In this dull, dispiriting time we have to get our humour where we can find it, no matter in how…

Guest notes

Trade notes

Boris picks a real Tory In his two years as prime minister, Tony Abbott achieved more to help Australia’s exporters…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Living in Trumpland

Or how I learned to love The Donald and enjoy the greatest show on earth

Features Australia

Out with the old

The future looks bleak when politics, not science, drives the response to Covid-19

Features Australia

Auty, Albrechtsen and the fate of the West

Question: why do so many academics favour Marx?

Features Australia

Covid is changing everything

The biggest public policy disaster in decades

Features Australia

Business/Robbery etc.

London rules the roost at Rio Tinto If push came to shove between Australia and China, don’t expect Australia’s biggest…

Features Australia

Mr Morrison, tear down these walls

Locked in, locked down, locked out, locked up

Features Australia

Enthusiasm, the winning ingredient

It’s the most important election for Australia, too

Features

Notes on...

Bread

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early this year — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a…

Features

La petite mort

The oldest churchyard in Torquay is being used by people openly having sex and sunbathing nude in broad daylight. This…

Features

Journey of faith

Pilgrimage in the age of pandemic

Features

Bad apple

As New Yorkers flee, the suburbs are under siege

Features

Downside’s downfall

The dissolution of a monastery

Features

Tennis racket

How grunting helps players win

Features

The Covid trap

Will we ever go back to how we were?

Features

The invisible men

Home-working shows how many government jobs can be moved out of London

Features

Rush jab

Fast-tracking vaccines can be disastrous – even if they work

The Week

Diary

Diary

It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and…

Leading article

A question of competence

This week was built up by the Prime Minister to be the moment that would mark the return of economic…

Letters

Letters

Cladding fear Sir: Emma Byrne’s report on the cladding scandal (‘Ill clad’, 29 August) will have given many of those…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home Simon Case, aged 41, the private secretary to the Duke of Cambridge 2018-20, was appointed Cabinet Secretary and Head…

From The Archives

With the Benedictines

From 18 October 1946: Their whole aim and object is to exemplify in their lives and corporate activity their sense…

Barometer

Barometer

Culture clashes The pop star Adele was accused of ‘cultural appropriation’ for adopting a Jamaican hairstyle for the online Notting…

Ancient and modern

Little wonder

The British Museum’s aim is to use its collection ‘for the benefit and education of humanity’. If that manifests itself…

Columnists

Any other business

Are the wheels coming off Rolls-Royce?

Along, cold weekend brought a haul of business news more bad than good. The worst was from aero-engine maker Rolls-Royce,…

Columns

How a lie becomes truth

Teachers were told to exclude children who made ‘inappropriate’ jokes about Covid when they returned to school this week. These…

Columns

To save the Union, negotiate independence

The first cabinet meeting of the new term and Boris Johnson’s summer holiday were both dominated by one concern: how…

Columns

The trouble with ‘taking back control’

I sympathised with Leave voters who yearned to ‘take back control’ of British borders. After all, if being a country…

Columns

Are liberal conservatives now history?

It was a luminous late August sunset, and we were in France, dining outdoors with some friends who have a…

Books

More from Books

Pirate principality

In 2012, the editors of Vice ran an article aimed at would-be contributors to their self-avowedly edgy magazine headed ‘Never…

More from Books

Epic of gossip

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the…

More from Books

Forlorn hope

Parents are always terrified of bad family history repeating itself. Prince Albert dreaded his son Bertie turning into a roué…

More from Books

Fools and fraudsters

In Money for Nothing, Thomas Levenson brings us into the story of the South Sea Bubble by writing about the…

More from Books

All things to all men

Britain’s two most famous legendary figures, King Arthur and Robin Hood, remain enduringly and endearingly elusive, and thus ever-fascinating: Arthur…

More from Books

Going quietly mad

Like Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel Eileen (2015), Death in Her Hands plays with the conventions of noir. Vesta Gul, a…

Lead book review

The man who hunted himself

Graham Greene was constantly searching for peace of mind along with escapist thrills, says Nicholas Shakespeare

Arts

Australian Arts

Books shop

When the Irish comedian Dylan Moran was interviewed on ABC radio last year as a precursor to his (now presumably…

Culture Buff

Angus Cerini

No longer confined to the digital space, the Australian Chamber Orchestra is returning to the platform in City Recital Hall…

Australian Films

Battle honours

In the cabinet war rooms in Whitehall in London, there is a chart which registers Atlantic convoys en route from…

Arts feature

National review

Why does the state fund theatres and not gardening and bingo, asks Lloyd Evans

Film

Hundrum

Mulan is Disney’s latest live-action remake, coming in at 120 minutes, compared with the 1998 animation, which ran to 80.…

Exhibitions

Stanley and his women

It sometimes rains in Cookham. It rained all day when I visited the Stanley Spencer Gallery to see the exhibition…

More from Arts

Sold down the river

The roots of the Southbank Centre’s current crisis stretch back to before the pandemic, says Oliver Basciano

Music

Barely touching the void

The Royal Albert Hall, as Douglas Adams never wrote, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely,…

Television

Bearing all

Few things better capture the crazed cognitive dissonance of our age than this: that while we cower behind masks for…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life

Peter Scammell There is no doubt that the corona virus pandemic is changing the way we live and think about…

Bridge

Bridge

A major pandemic has been sweeping through the bridge world since the game went online — and it’s called cheating.…

Low life

Low life

In France I own a dented old Mercedes and in England a dented old Mitsubishi Carina. The Mercedes is parked…

The turf

The turf

We all have weeks when every win bet finishes second and every each-way comes home in fourth. You begin to…

Crossword

2473: May

The unclued lights (two of two words) are of a kind. Across 12 To make sense of Sun puzzle, many…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 620

White to play. Zaibi–Napoleao, Online Olympiad, August 2020. White has just sacrificed the rook on a1. He concluded the attack…

Competition

Cento

In Competition No. 3164 you were invited to submit a poem in which each line comes from a different well-known…

High life

High life

Gstaad I experienced my first Zoom conference last week, and didn’t think much of it. As the great Yogi Berra…

Real life

Real life

Always the National Trust sticker. It feels like every time a car parks across the gateway to my horses’ field…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2470: Express route

The unclued lights are places served by the Norwegian HURTIGRUTEN ferries from Bergen to Kirkenes. Tromsø (at 4D) overruns into…

Chess

Act of God

Man plans, God laughs. Fide, the international federation, organised an Online Olympiad, with 163 teams taking part. We got a…

The Wiki Man

Remote workers of the world, unite!

A few nights ago on Twitter, I quipped that I was planning to launch a trade union for remote workers.…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. Some friends persist on displaying our email addresses in large address lists when sending out round robins to all…

No sacred cows

The best leader we never had

I spent Monday afternoon with The Wake Up Call, a new book by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge that lambasts…

Drink

Right up my alley

I suspect, though this may be romanticising, that if a French lorry driver with hitherto suppressed culinary tastes won France’s…

Mind your language

Scots

A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the…