Scott Morrison’s first budget, delivered last Tuesday, was the Turnbull government’s opportunity to grasp the nettle and finally lay out…

On the day I left Australia after an enjoyable month at the Centre for Independent Studies, the Guardian newspaper (which…

Is keeping Christopher Pyne in Parliament and Malcolm Turnbull in The Lodge really worth over-spending $50 billion on a fleet…

The submarine decision is yet another example of how far South Australia has been submerged by welfarism

The standard of submarine you float in is the standard you accept

Abbott has accepted Turnbull. Can Turnbull accept Abbott?

The ANZAC’s victory in the desert must never be forgotten

Turkey’s thuggish president has European leaders exactly where he wants them

I switched to ordinary clothes, and felt much better for it. You will too

Jeremy Corbyn and company’s anti-Semitism crisis is a symptom of a much wider malaise

The Tory bid to retain the mayoralty seemed to occur in a ­vacuum, shielded from the public gaze

What happened when I tried American neighbourliness in London

There will be many Catholics on both sides of the coming referendum. But I know which side I’m on

Clumbers require careful handling, but you lose your heart easily to them

The presumptive Republican nominee is indeed a danger to the world – but not for the reasons most people are saying

And: Donald Trump on verge of nomination, Spain to hold new elections, EU Commission backs Schengen entry for Turks

Also in Petronella Wyatt’s diary: Coward and Fleming’s Jamaica; ex-PMs’ protection; Wallis Simpson’s figure

Also in our Barometer column: the British cities that tip most, circus animals, and other remarkable things about Leicester

Pliny on the animal ‘closest to man in disposition’

A case for military government in the aftermath of the Easter Rising

Mad and bad Sir: I suspect that Gary Johns is correct in his assertion that Anders Breivik was having a…

Eight years of running London have made him a leadership contender in a way he simply wasn’t before

Also in The Spectator’s Notes: Geoffrey Howe’s memorial; the FT’s EU confusion; Sir Philip Green’s knighthood; Bishop Bell’s reputation

I will personally chaperone the people of the city towards the precipitous edge of Beachy Head

A month of disconnected tests with my new baby has brought home to me just how complex health records can be

Where 25 years ago the environment was considered everyone’s domain, it has since been hijacked by the left

Also in Any Other Business: the curse of the acronym, Mike Ashley and BHS, and the other Ranieri

Catherine Fletcher’s account of the life — and violent death — of Alessandro de’ Medici, known as ‘il Moro’, is quite as gripping as Othello

Lawlessness reigns as the world runs out of basics in Lionel Shriver’s apocalyptic novel, The Mandibles

Her latest warmhearted tale centres round a friendly, bigoted Ukrainian grandmother making the best of dingy tower-block life

Jones’s science may be good, but his history is all over the place in No Need for Geniuses, a survey of invention and progress in the Age of the Enlightenment

In his highly disturbing The Perfect Bet, Adam Kucharski reveals how global politics and economics are increasingly dictated by a system of informed gambling

Nepal’s stunning capital, having opened itself to the world, is inevitably losing some of its Shangri-La magic, according to Thomas Bell

Tahmima Anam writes movingly of an arranged marriage and unfulfilled love in her tender third novel, The Bones of Grace

Anna Beer’s account of female musicians from the ninth century to the present finds them often vilified as loose women or even witches

Ta-Nehisi Coates — a name we should all be getting to know — describes escaping the black ghetto for university life in an inspiring memoir, The Beautiful Struggle

The Czech runner’s unorthodox style — described as ‘a man wrestling an octopus on a conveyor belt’ — set 18 world records and won him the Triple Crown in 1952

Jack Lynch turns up some delightful reference books from the past, including Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich and A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist

Matilda Bathurst reviews short stories by debut writers Daniele McLaughlin, Greg Jackson and Arlene Heyman — and a first volume in over 20 years from Julia O’Faolain

The friend of Boswell and Johnson was clearly a most engaging man of letters — but, frustratingly, he remains an enigma in Norma Clarke’s Brothers of the Quill

Having done something similar myself, I wondered how Bill Shorten would handle the challenge of a campaign biography. My book,…

Were Florence Foster Jenkins and her fellow culprits touchingly heroic, cynically fraudulent or just plain bonkers?

Plus: at the Lyttelton Theatre, a Soviet satire becomes a smart contemporary spoof in the hands of Suhayla El-Bushra

Maria Sibylla Merian transformed our understanding of insects and gave us some of the most beautiful scientific illustrations in the process

‘I still stand amazed at the power of the written word. People will tolerate almost anything but being on the wrong side of a published opinion’

But the conductor’s light, fleet way with the music at least allowed this element to proceed in an attractive way

Stephen Frears’s new film fails to ask the most important and basic question: how did Florence not know she was an awful singer?

Plus: some convincing sexual depravity in Tannhauser and an outstanding new double bill from the BalletBoyz at Sadler’s Wells

Paul McCartney’s music is supreme but as a person he’s really not very likeable

Tom Service’s new Sunday afternoon programme The Listening Service isn’t as satisfying as Catherine Bott’s long-established series on Classic FM

Plus: Grayson Perry's new Channel 4 documentary All Man was far less banal than it looked likely to be at the start

To be celebrating the 200th anniversary this year of the Royal Botanic Gardens is quite astounding. Just 28 years after…

People today are obsessed with living healthily but then go out and behave like slobs

A worker is suing the government claiming that having nothing to do at work triggered depression and epilepsy

It may need new carpets, replastering, a new kitchen and bathroom but there are no bifold doors so I’m buying it

I’ve been practising bidding online with my friend Guy Hart in preparation for the Spring Fours in Stratford (we’ll know…

Last week we saw the reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen taking a leaf from Alekhine’s book to destroy eccentric opening…

White to play. This is from Pacher-Radnai, Budapest 2016. How did White exploit a tactical opportunity to make a decisive…

In Competition No. 2946 you were invited to supply a verse obituary of a well-known person who has died in…

The unclued lights (one of two words) can be preceded by the same word which is hidden in the completed…

The unclued lights reveal ELEVEN (five English and six Scottish) league football teams (3/38, 4/1D, 10, 14, 18, 18/28, 19,…

These moronic, selfish middle-class warriors are entrenching class divisions

Social instincts honed in earlier times still have a huge, irrational pull on how we do business

Plus: bad behaviour at a Sunday lunch for friends and neighbours; and a hearing aid addendum

They last longer than you’d think

The rise of ‘original pronunciation’, and the way it’s worked out

I’ve often wondered what Australia would today be like if the Comte de Lapérouse had landed at Botany Bay a…