The Spectator
7 April 2018 Aus
It’s (party) time
Australia
Monash
According to his biographer Geoffrey Serle, in the 1920s Sir John Monash was ‘broadly accepted, not just in Victoria, as…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
A few weeks ago, I was lamenting that the big shots in the Law Council of Australia, the lawyers’ trade…
Australian Features
It’s (party) time
Was there anyone who was not moved when they saw former Australian cricket captain Steve Smith’s public act of contrition…
The death of expertise
It must have been a joke. The other day, I was looking through the Harvard Magazine and saw a piece…
Business/Robbery etc
Collateral damage – and it’s not only from the (unlikely) risk of a world-wide protectionist tariff war. ‘Friendly (economic) fire’…
Kleptocracy on the Cape
There is a brilliant scene in Evelyn Waugh’s paean to Fleet Street, Scoop, in which the reader is acquainted with…
Illusion of knowledge warming the planet
In this the 30th anniversary year of the IPCC, we should look back and remember the original sin with which…
Coronate Buddy Franklin
Advocates for an Australian republic have spent the last two decades patiently waiting for the Queen of England to die.…
Britain gagged
When emails from the group Britain First began turning up in my inbox, I took it for granted that it…
Send the white farmers to the outback!
In a characteristically pungent Speccie piece, Rod Liddle recently described as ‘genocide’ the situation of white farmers in the semi-arid…
Opposition to e-cigs is running out of puff
In 2003 Hon Lik, a Beijing pharmacist, developed an electronic cigarette which attracted interest from industry. Decades before, Hon Lik…
Features
Red London: Labour is poised to take the capital
Ever since last year’s general election, when Jeremy Corbyn inspired the strongest Labour surge since 1945, the Conservatives have been…
Sadiq Khan is a lousy London Mayor. Why hasn’t anyone noticed?
According to people at City Hall, Sadiq Khan writes some of his own press releases. I can believe it: they’ve…
We need 10,000 tigers in the wild
I am here in India looking for tigers, and am struck by the way my fellow human beings respond to…
I take no pleasure in seeing England get all out for 58
‘Ah, the old man injury!’ That’s what people said when I busted my calf a couple of years ago. At…
Macron’s Thatcher moment has arrived
The honeymoon is over for Emmanuel Macron. His first 11 months in office have been something of a breeze —…
How to be a tourist in Europe
Last week, I was in the Florence Baptistery by 8.30 a.m. That used to be early enough to avoid the…
Southend-on-Sea has long been a running joke – until now
Standing at the end of Britain’s longest pier, on a cold and misty morning, looking out across the Thames Estuary,…
The Week
Why London’s soaring murder rate is everyone’s problem
Any notion that the surge in killings in London was a problem confined to gang members has been dispelled by…
Portrait of the Week: Corbyn and Jewdas and Kim Jong-un’s visit to South Korea
Home Alison Saunders said she would relinquish her position as the Director of Public Prosecutions when her five-year contract ends…
Warner and Smith are paying for the sins of a generation of Australian cricket players
When the much-admired (and very tall) literary agent Gillon Aitken died in October 2016, he left most of his estate…
Putin’s diseased ideology
The Russian economy is not in the greatest of shapes. That being the case, one would have thought friendly diplomatic…
Letters: the very belief that poorer pupils do less well is what limits them
Self-limiting beliefs Sir: As someone who spent much of his working life teaching at Eton and Harrow, it was amusing…
Columnists
Labour moderates are desperate to leave – but there’s nowhere to go
The case for Labour moderates leaving their party strengthens by the day. Jeremy Corbyn’s behaviour demonstrates that he is not…
Corbyn, anti-Semitism and the righteous vanity of Tony Benn
What is it, psychologically, that makes it so hard for Jeremy Corbyn to recognise that some of his supporters are…
The DPP’s Alison Saunders was never much cop
An interesting development for our police force, then. In future they do not have to believe everything someone tells them,…
Has Virgin trains lost the plot?
Twelve minutes till the train. That had seemed like quite enough time as I approached the Virgin ticket machine. Two…
Why a Big Oil row tells us it’s time to stop fetishising experts
Something extraordinary and largely unreported has just happened in a court in San Francisco. A federal judge has said that…
Call this US-China tit-for-tat a trade war?
‘Stocks plunge as China hits US goods with tariffs,’ said a headline after the long weekend, and the FTSE100 duly…
Books
1968 and the summer of our discontent
’68 will do as shorthand. Most of ’68, as it were, didn’t happen in 1968. It was, at most, the…
Free as a bird: the beauty and exhilaration of gliding
Over the years I’ve been in touch with a number of middle-aged professionals who, despite the success they’ve found in…
Spend, spend, spend at the court of Philip IV of Spain
‘Nine hours,’ boasted my friend the curator about his trip to the Prado. Nine! Two hours is my upper limit…
For peat’s sake: Britain’s bogs and moorland in crisis
In 2008, the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie characterised the typical exponent of modern nature writing as ‘the lone enraptured male’.…
How can we know what dead people want?
In 1999, Patrick Hemingway published True at First Light, a new novel by his father Ernest. In his role as…
Alarm bells ring when I read about grown women and dolls
Mona — single, childless, pushing 60 — sells wooden dolls made by a carpenter friend, which she delicately costumes from…
Meeting the last Cuban fisherman to have known Ernest Hemingway
In Havana, one week before President Obama unthawed half a century of cold relations with Cuba, I talked to the…
The swallows that herald spring
Sweet lovers, Shakespeare reminds us, love the spring. How can they not? All that wonderfully wanton colour, all that sensual…
Why do the Japanese despise sex?
There are two sorts of people: those who can’t wait to grow up, and those who wish they never had…
The selfish shrink: life with Jacques Lacan
Peyrot, the chef at Le Vivarois in Paris, had a fascinating theory of how one of his regulars, the otherwise…
Down’s syndrome and dystopia in Jesse Bull’s Census
Census is a curious, clever novel. It depicts a dystopia with a father and his Down’s syndrome son journeying from…
The enduring enigma of Nefertiti
Often dubbed the Mona Lisa of the ancient world, the bust of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti is as immediately recognisable…
Arts
From Stansted to corporate swank: superstructuralism has a lot to answer for
Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of…
Hobbit houses and 3-D homes – everything about these videos should be intensely irritating
Since 2006, someone called Kirsten Dirksen has been posting weekly videos on YouTube about ‘simple living, self-sufficiency, small (and tiny)…
Why British radio plays can’t compete with those from the Continent
To Herne Bay in Kent for the UK International Radio Drama Festival: 50 plays from 17 countries in 15 languages…
Once seen as the coming force in British painting, John Craxton deserves another look
In late April 1992, I was in Crete, interviewing the painter John Craxton. It was the week that Francis Bacon…
Flouncy, tasteless and unsubtle – I loved it: Ruthless! The Musical reviewed
Ruthless! The Musical is a camp extravaganza about ambitious actors stranded in small-town America. Sylvia St Croix, a pushy agent,…
This Hansel and Gretel has ‘classic’ stamped all over it
It’s been a good couple of weeks for cuddly toys in opera. A big floppy Eeyore is the only comfort…
Portentous, po-faced but also highly imaginative: The City & The City reviewed
BBC2 has a new drama series for Friday nights. The main character is a world-weary middle-aged police inspector with an…
Iceland’s national composer returns from oblivion
The lur is a horn, modelled in bronze after a number of 3,000-year-old instruments discovered at various archaeological sites across…
Plenty to wonder at – like who thought it was a good idea to make it: Wonderstruck reviewed
Wonderstruck is a film by Todd Haynes and you will certainly be struck by wonder, often. You will wonder at…
Cartier London Halo Tiara 1936
We’ve grown used to fashion and related objects being the subject of exhibitions at our major galleries but a commercially…
Life
In The US of A, it’s a woman’s, woman’s, woman’s world!
New York If Albanian television had shown the programme CBS did last week — with a woman who has sex…
I try to cut the hypocrisy when speaking to my boy – but it’s tough sometimes
My boy rang the other night. He said he and his wife had bought tickets to see Ed Sheeran at…
I have broken a mirror — only seven years bad luck to go!
The broken mirror lay in hundreds of shattered pieces on my bathroom floor, having fallen off the wall while I…
Farming is a hard life no matter where you do it
Laikipia, Kenya Erupe is a Kenyan farmer. He owns a smallholding of a few acres not far from my own…
Space travel
No, not the type of space travel allegedly enjoyed by the World Chess Federation president, Kirsan Ilumzinov, during his self-confessed…
no. 500
White to play. This position is from Jones-Deac, European Team Championship, Batumi 2018. Can you spot White’s crushing breakthrough? Answers…
Carroll in La La Land
In Competition No. 3042, a challenge inspired by the American parodist Frank Jacobs’s 1975 version of ‘Jabberwocky’, ‘As If Lewis…
2353: Too many
The unclued lights, three of two words and four pairs are of a kind. Elsewhere, ignore two accents. Across…
to 2350: Pieces
The unclued lights are classical French plays (‘PIÈCES’) by Corneille (9, 18, 21A), Molière (11, 23, and 21D/29) and Racine (1A,…
A very British response to a death at a funeral
Something very odd occurred at a funeral I attended last week — somebody died. I don’t mean the person who…
Cricket’s ball-tampering scandal has been nothing but a tearful pantomime
I haven’t seen so many men crying since the end of A Tale of Two Cities at the Scala Cinema…
Dear Mary: How do we deal with our host’s sudden, terrifying rages?
Q. Along with five of my favourite people, I’ve been invited again to what should be an idyllic house party…
How Soho became so-so: Kettner’s Townhouse reviewed
Sometimes I fret that Soho House & Co is doing to this column what it does to London. It places…
He, they, fae, fer or ze? Check your pronouns
Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today…
