Here we go again. No sooner is Labor elected than they claim a mandate to create an institution that will…

When I was an MP, ‘details’ was my middle name. Whenever we had a brain-snap about the latest way to…

Don’t be fooled

Aukus could create unintended consequences

Beijing’s sabre-rattling about Pelosi is just the latest attempt to bully the West

Governments are incentivising the growth of Aboriginal identity fraud

Housing trans prisoners is not straight forward

Giving judges a blank cheque is fraught with danger

We need better parties to deal with the coming crises

The University of Melbourne is training revolutionaries to dismantle the nation

Four Labor policies will damage Australia

The demographic crisis might stall its rise

Ten rules for the next Tory leader to live by

Every few months I take out a box of essential oils and carefully lay them out on my kitchen table,…

Why must my mobile provider harass me all through my holiday?

What foreign policy would look like under a PM Truss

Sanctions are working — whatever Russia says

What we can learn from Jim Corbett’s big-cat tales

How Sunak wowed the Tories of West Suffolk

It is clear that the country will soon need a Water Czar. Augustus’s right-hand man Agrippa would be the one…

Injured party Sir: Prue Leith’s short interlude as a Conservative party member and subsequent resignation underlines a feature of the…

Liz Truss has taken the lead in the Tory leadership race with an agenda that seems radical and ambitious, whereas…

The Season has ended and – apart from The Spectator’s summer bash of course – the two bang-up parties of…

An idea past its sell-by date Waitrose has announced the removal of ‘best before’ dates from many food products. –…

Home BP reported quarterly profits of £6.9 billion, its biggest for 14 years, after oil and gas prices rose steeply.…

‘Truss’s campaign to be Britain’s next prime minister,’ wrote one political commentator this week, ‘seems to have unstoppable momentum. She…

Most push notifications that pop up on my tablet concern impending catastrophe. But last week, one newsflash made my day.…

During that rather strange summer of 2020 I used the phrase ‘the gentle armed robber George Floyd’ in several articles…

‘What’s worse, they’re paying the profits to shareholders,’ said a grey-haired woman ahead of me in the Co-op queue. ‘Bloody…

Joe Biden’s week did not get off to a good start. When running for office in 2020 he repeatedly boasted…

One influential figure on the centre-left told me recently that he isn’t bothered about who wins the Tory leadership contest.…

Given the ingenuity of machine-makers, said Descartes in the 17th century, machines might well be constructed that exactly resemble humans.…

Early on in Enter the Dragon our hero, the acrobatic Kung Fu fighter Bruce Lee, tells a young pupil to…

Mohsin Hamid’s fifth novel opens with a Kafkaesque twist: Anders, a white man, wakes to find that he has turned…

In 1968, the US anthropologist Oscar Lewis arrived in Cuba with a tape recorder and a mission to capture the…

Ned Beauman’s novels are like strange attractors for words with the letter ‘Z’. They zip, zing, fizz, dazzle and sizzle.…

Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…

Seán Hewitt, born in 1990, realised that he was gay at a very early age. ‘A kind, large woman’ who…

In 1993 William Waldegrave, the science minister, was looking into a project being planned on the continent. Cern, the European…

How are non-conformists assimilated within the cloistered walls of tradition? Richard Wagner supplied the best answer to the age-old question…

Here’s a thing. A disturbing book about disturbing cities. And it’s full of loaded questions. Like Hezbollah, the publisher uses…

Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…

Justin Marozzi finds Egypt teeming with Germans after the second world war

It is good for historians to take the plungeinto political writing, using their knowledgewhere they can to illuminate our present…

So, Archie Roach is dead at 66. It’s hard to read of the artistic triumphs and the personal catastrophes without…

A neglected little town in Merseyside is the natural home for Shakespeare North, says Robert Gore-Langton

It’s hard to imagine in the wake of GoodFellas, The Sopranos and Gomorrah but there was a time, not so…

Sick though one may be of the way that the poison dart of ‘woke’ is lazily flung at what is…

The blurb accompanying the Radio 3 series World of Classical, inviting us to ‘join the dots between classical music traditions…

You feel a little sorry for Renaissance, the first solo album by Beyoncé in more than six years. It just…

The Barbican’s big summer show is billed on the website as ‘the sold-out musical sensation, Anything Goes’. The term ‘sold-out’…

I read in the Australian last week that the Queensland parliament is considering criminalising stealthing. And no, that’s not a…

A Speccie reader has alerted me to the use of an odd word ‘alum’ to refer to the graduates of…

Everything is well and truly burned to a crisp, and we are piling through hundreds of pounds of hay a…

I’m staying for a week in an 1850s house in the Surrey hills that looks-wise might have been built for…

‘You’re being unfaithful,’ says the punter’s wife brandishing a note found in her husband’s suit pocket: ‘Dorothea 07440 521321.’ ‘No,…

I’ve never been very good at leaving things be. I tend to gild the lily. I may plan to do…

Black to play. Smirnov – Duda, Chennai Olympiad 2022. With his next move, Duda forced a decisive gain of material.…

The unclued lights 11 SOLITARY, 8 POOR, 38 NASTY, 36 BRUTISH and 35 SHORT are descriptions of 1 THE LIFE…

 Patmos Judging by the news, the world is finally coming apart: Chinese lab escapee Covid is still going strong, monkeypox…

The unclued lights (including two pairs, one of which is three words, and one single light of three words) are…

In Competition No. 3260, a challenge suggested by a reader, you were invited to reveal the existence of a hitherto…

In the modern game, being green versus red (non-vul v. vul) is a licence to bid on tram tickets: passing…

I chatted to a spectator after one of my games at the Sparkassen Chess Trophy in Dortmund. ‘A close shave…

I’m writing this on the plane back from Iceland, a fact that fills me with relief. Not because I didn’t…

The Conservative party leadership contest is a milestone for diversity and inclusion. This time, we get to choose between someone…

Q. My parents are abroad for two months and as my flatmates in London are all, like me, working from…

Imagine a camel train, crossing the great desert. The remaining water is rancid; the beasts’ humps are shrunken. Death looms.…

‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end…