‘Our job is to simplify, to tear away the unrelated, to pluck out the weeds that are smothering the product…

Australia originally appeared to me in the form of a boyfriend. A fellow student brought him home one evening without…

The Prohibit Small Parties Party

Tony Abbott must heed the lessons of the Liberal loss in Victoria

Rather than striking a blow for individual liberties, the dogma of gay marriage is stifling them

Naomi Milgrom, one of Australia’s wealthiest women, defies the crtics with her philanthropic design and architecture

Australia has a serious aging problem: our fertility rate is below the level needed just to keep the population steady…

The Prohibit Small Parties Party

It looks like a news channel. It talks like a news channel. It says whatever Putin wants

Since the invasion of Crimea, Russia's President has been conducting an experiment in anti-western rebellion

My dad’s back working in a car factory at 77, a lifetime’s work wrecked by a blighted house

It's not that he presided over a golden age; it's that the problems have become clearer since

It’s in his leadership of Argentina’s Jesuits, when he laid emphasis on the perspective of the ordinary faithful poor, that the truth is to be found

The Tatler documentary brought me instant fame – and mockery

The best voices draw attention to the words spoken, not the speaker

The plan was to pour the apple juice into an oak hogshead, freshly emptied of its whisky...

He achieves great things when he goes for it. On the debt, he's not going for it

Home The government spent days announcing how the Autumn Statement would allocate funds. ‘Frontline’ parts of the National Health Service…

There are more than 20 Sun journalists still on trial or facing prosecution — some of whom have been on bail for three years

Plus: Other ways to spend the £3 million cost of ‘plebgate’, and will Bicester really be a garden city?

An ancient analysis of rage still fits today’s headlines

From ‘The Honourable Spy’, The Spectator, 5 December 1914: Decency is violated by the military spy when he becomes, for…

Friend or foe? Sir: The editorial piece ( Spectator Australia, 29 Nov.) and following article by James Allan deal broadly…

Osborne has achieved one of the most difficult things in his profession: renewing himself in office

The truth about all those utterly bogus statistics you see in the newspapers

It happened to Michael Gove. It's happened to me. I'm starting to wonder if it's the death of debate

Plus: A corporate morality tale about reward and achievement

A review of Ziauddin Sardar’s Mecca argues that Islam’s most sacred city has been desecrated irrevocably by the Saudis

A review of Wood, Whiskey and Wine by Henry H. Work, shows how the humble barrel has transformed our lives

A review of Why Aren’t We Dead Yet? by Idan Ben-Barak describes the complicated germ warfare being conducted daily within us

In A Theft: My Con Man, the author Hanif Kureishi describes how his trusted friend and accountant swindled him out of a fortune

In a review of Suspended Sentences by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paris and the Occupation of France take centre-stage

A review of Britannia Obscura by Joanna Parker reveals a Britain — mostly subterranean — we scarcely knew existed

Two books tackle the subject of violence in strikingly different ways

A review of Michael Dillon’s biography of Deng Xiaoping reveals the Chinese leader’s ruthlessness in the great famine and the Tiananmen Square massacre

Cilla Black, Joey Essex, Roger Moore, Dermot O’Leary and Luis Suárez come under Christopher Howse’s scrutiny

An explosive new book uncovers abuse at the heart of one of classical music’s most revered institutions. Damian Thompson finds it’s the tip of an iceberg

Two exhibitions in Norwich celebrate the Life Room of John Wonnacott and John Lessore that marked a high point for this time-honoured practice

The National Gallery’s Peder Balke show, full of epic sea storms and frozen desolation, is a revelation

Peter Phillips is interested to see even arch-modernist Harrison Birtwistle turning to tonality in his latest work for the Merton Choirbook

Ismene Brown is intrigued by an 18th century baby shower, spooked by a worldweary Dracula, bored by an overlong Rambert triple and disappointed by Len Goodman and Lucy Worsley

2014 was the 250th anniversary of one of great French musical adventurers, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Were the celebrations generous enough?

Plus: a gripping analysis of the addict’s psyche as it yo-yos between despair, euphoria and another crack pipe at the Tristan Bates Theatre

But you can imagine Murray’s eyes lighting up when he first saw the script - drinking! Smoking! Whoring! Betting!

Remember Me would be BBC1’s best current drama - if it wasn’t for The Missing

Two programmes on Radio 4 this week explore how it is not cash that our health systems lack but a way of processing all our knowledge

We’ve established that capital city festivals are for other people. Their principal purpose is to bring people into the city,…

One by one the taverns that made the city hum with Runyonesque characters are being replaced by the sleek and the glitzy

The man from the Daily Mail was as great a traveller as that Satanic-faced Victorian Sir Richard Burton

The atmosphere was a cross between All Quiet on the Western Front and Children of the Corn

The problem is our big beasts' inability to realise that their pre-eminence is partly down to luck

I witnessed utter carnage at the bridge table the other week. I was watching the European Champions Cup online when…

London chess fans are about to enjoy a great treat. The London Chess Classic will run from the 10-14 December…

White to play. This position is a variation from Larsen-Portisch, London 1986. How can White exploit a fatal weakness in…

In Competition No. 2876 you were invited to submit an example of an ill-advised foray by a poet laureate, past…

The other unclued entries, in pairs around 3D, provide the key words in a definition of 11D.   Across  …

The eight unclued lights are anagrams of eight clued solutions: 2/12, 3/13, 8/35, 16/40, 18/28, 19/30, 24/27 and 26/38. First…

The campaign to force fathers to take equal time off is under way in Sweden. Expect it here next

The public provision of tables is so bad that Starbucks now earns $15 ­billion a year renting out horizontal surfaces

Plus: Dealing with Uber driver flattery, and a cure for Christmas alone

At 4 p.m., there was still a glass left for me

In his speech on immigration last week, David Cameron said a couple of funny things. I’m not talking about the…