Under which particular pillow does Joe Hockey hope to find a lazy trillion dollars lurking? That’s the estimated investment Australian…

I have just spent several wonderful days watching the unfolding of a magnificent drama about dragons, crazy sisters, narcissists, misfits,…

One or two obtuse observers expressed surprise that Martin Sharp came in the end to embrace conservative values. He even…

One of the joys of travelling to outposts of the Anglosphere is that it’s often much more British than Britain.…

The upshot from the Gonski drama is that Tony Abbott has killed his own inner spin doctor

The Iron Lady’s legacy is that, thank goodness, the free-market economy is the only show in town

With their protectionist retreat, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey are curtailing job-creating investment

Every year you give away up to £5,000 of data online. The greatest heist in history isn't about stealing money, but taking information

The only thing worse than being stalked is not being stalked, as the chap almost put it

The bank squeezed us over a misdemeanour and caused us to have an 'equity gap' — we later learnt its own equity gap would cost taxpayers billions

'There's no place for prejudice in a grotto situation,' I was told. I couldn't ask kids about Mummy and Daddy, since a child might have just a Mummy or two Mummies

How France became the neocons’ favourite nation

How many more resignations from super-heads do we need till we realise the system of parachuting top teachers into failing schools is a recipe for corruption?

Bills are still going up in the long term – unless the government acts

The winner of the first ever Michael Heath award for cartooning is Len Hawkins. One of his drawings appears below.…

Question: what do you call several dozen pop-up shops, all freshly popped up together at the one time of year…

Here's what the Chancellor could do for the lowest-paid — a dramatic tax cut worth at least one month's extra salary a year

Home George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said that average energy bills would be brought £50 lower through government…

Plus: Jokes that last longer than reality; stop the parade of TV tat; how Seventies hippies caused a generation that can barely read or write

To watch the Revd Paul Flowers being grilled by the Treasury Select Committee on his role in the demise of…

Plus: What brings immigrants here; the classes who attend Oxbridge; which is blacker — Black Monday or Black Friday

Climate scientists write… Sir: Lord Lawson has written in his diary (30 November) under the online summary headline ‘my secret…

People like Francis Maude have been condemned for pointing out the inefficiencies of Whitehall. But change could be coming

Plus: Boris's stand on equality prepares him for leadership; I am so excited to be related to a high priestess of Isis

A very useful feature in the Daily Telegraph informs me of the best 20 towns in Britain ‘for Christmas’. Number…

Why did the Costa Rican amphibian disappear? You'll find a lot of waffle in highly-respective science journals attributing this to 'climate change'

Plus: Logic should be mandatory in schools; why we probably won't get the right message from poor Peaches' tweet

Debunking great reputations is out of fashion — and anyway Raine tends to miss the point in his preeningly entitled More Dynamite: Essays

George Tiffin's All the Best Lines features the best dialogue in films, while David Thomson's Moments That Made the Movies gathers the most enthralling sequences

The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom, The Making of Assisi, Spectacular Miracles, The King's Pictures, The Art Deco Poster and Turner and the Sea are some of our picks

Marianne Moore slept in the same bed as her mother and dined with her on the edge of the bath-tub — this may have helped her poetry, says Linda Leavell in Holding on Upside Down

The Big New Yorker Book of Cats contains stories, cartoons and facts about felines, including the best way to get rid of them

From the two Eds to the Darlings to the unfunny al-Fayed, this compilation of Rifkind's diary columns is an enticing bible of satire

Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich shows we don't think about life until death looms — and the newest translation, by the late Peter Carson, has an intriguing back story

In Cooking People, Sophie Waugh makes us laugh with her astute observations about five women chefs, while pondering a puzzle about Biblical swine

Red Love is a compelling biography by Maxim Leo, a natural narrator whose sentences ring with hopelessness when his characters feel empty, and with abandon when his characters feel free

Architects must accept that they are trapped in history - and that's part of the richness of culture, says the Brit whose buildings have caused a stir in Germany

The problem with the Barbican's Act Two-only production is that one doesn't get a real sense of who the lovers are, and who they're destined to be

The artist didn't express what an action looks like, but rather what it feels like — as the Visions of Paris exhibition at the Royal Academy demonstrates

Jez Butterworth's play — with Cockney characters called Baby, Potts, Skinny — is a pastiche of a pastiche. But there's a marvellously moody cow in Tom Wells's Jack and the Beanstalk

Powder Room portrays, in an interesting way, young women desperately trying to have a good time while actually having a miserable one

Girls went wild after Scheherazade and Rite of Spring, dressing in peacock colours and turbans. Plus: William Byrd may not have been a very nice person

Plus: A Swedish film about young men dying of Aids proves love doesn't run out when life runs out — it's the other way round

Every day for six years, Joshua Dubois has sent a devotional email to the President, and they have little to do with politics — review

An exhibition at the Science Museum makes you feel like a particle in those tubes at Cern that are changing our understanding of life, the universe and everything

 New York I’m in an extremely happy state as I write this because a young Englishman flew over the ocean…

It’s a disgrace! I went up to London from Devon, a hick up from the sticks, to Annabel’s in Berkeley…

Emmylou Harris and the McGarrigle sisters wrote a song called ‘All I left Behind’. My version is called ‘All They…

John Thompson, who died last week at the age of 93, could have been editor of The Spectator if he…

In one of those old Mae West films a girl admires her friend’s jewellery: ‘Goodness, what lovely pearls,’ only to…

One of the most dramatic events of the Spanish American War was the sinking of the cargo ship Merrimac. Early…

This year’s London Classic tournament, organised by the indefatigable Malcolm Pein, who also heads up the charity Chess in Schools…

Black to play. This position is a variation from Evans-Staunton, London 1845. Can you spot Black’s fine finish to the…

In Competition 2826 you were invited to submit nonsense verse on a wintry theme. The line between sense and nonsense…

Each of seventeen clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter.…

The key word is BUTTERMILK (8), which can be separated into words defined by 15, 27, 40; 4, 23, 25;…

Which would you rather receive — cards from my kids' primary in Shepherd's Bush, or cards from the West London Free School? I know which I'd rather send

Data suggest computer games have brought about a fall in crime levels — are those who seek to ban such games being too utopian for society's good?

Plus: Using the Spectator, here's how to deal with gossipy passengers on the train (provided the passengers aren't savages)

Mouton is now classed as a first growth, though some oenophiles — and not only from Lafite — still dispute this claim

It's now in vogue, is popular with academics and denizens of the Westminster bubble — and sometimes has no meaning