It’s been an endless summer but not in the style of the 1966 classic film of sun and surf. Our…

Elites thwarting the great Aussie dream For too many Australians, the great Australian dream of home ownership becomes more elusive…

For a while there, I thought that my credentials on climate change were pretty good. As I explained to my…

Restoring Aussie tucker to the Poms?

Australia’s lacklustre politicians could take a leaf from the hero of Brexit

Fossil-fuelled hypocrisy of heroic proportions

Radical feminism is struggling with reality

Republicanism is near-comatose. Don’t revive it

Our prisons are fuelling radicalism, not fighting it

What I saw as prisons minister

The Democrats have gifted Trump his best week since taking office

On the Scottish literary giants who stoked the fires of Anglophobia

A conversation between Sinclair McKay and A.N. Wilson

The Bible’s message on same-sex relationships is open to dispute

Our worship of the ‘wild’ has gone too far

I’ve been playing a lot of Monopoly recently. My son got his first grown-up set for Christmas and, even after…

After being sacked as the chairman of the COP26, the UN climate conference which is to take place in Glasgow…

Home The United Kingdom quietly left the European Union at 11 p.m. GMT on 31 January. Boris Johnson, the Prime…

After I took the editor’s job at Today on Radio 4 nearly three years ago I had to answer to…

Mumbo jumbo The Prime Minister called opposition to imports of US-produced food ‘mumbo jumbo’. The expression was introduced to the…

The gloom that envelopes the Labour party stands in strong contrast to the confidence and hope that the Prime Minister…

‘Homosexuality without the cant’, by Simon Raven, 14 June 1968: ‘All virile societies,’ writes Mary McCarthy à propos the Florentines,…

The chance to fail Sir: Matt Ridley’s article ‘Risky business’ (1 February) offers a variety of reasons why innovation has been…

Regardless of one’s views on climate change, one should welcome the fact that Boris Johnson removed Claire Perry O’Neill from…

A prisoner is released early and just days later attacks people. It then emerges that he was known to still…

Sudesh Amman was singularly unsuccessful in his wish to kill kafirs, as he put it, and thereby find himself surrounded…

A week of remembrance marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz last month had me thinking hard about…

Readers of The Spectator who keep up with the latest literary hissy fits could have predicted (perhaps with a groan)…

So farewell Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom, the long–distance phone operator that became America’s biggest-ever bankruptcy case in…

The January dance stage can be a site of naked contrition. Like a tippler grasping at green juice after a…

Calamity Jane’s legend as brave frontierswoman, crack shot and compassionate nurse to the wounded was nurtured largely by herself. The truth, says Sam Leith, was dismayingly different

In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for…

Way back in 1996 Norman E. Sjoman published a book called The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, in which…

In the world of classic cars, barn-finds sometimes do occur. An old Mercedes Gullwing might be discovered under tarps and…

Although widely read in her native Hungary, Magda Szabó, who died in 2007, did not gain international acclaim until the…

In one of the most frequently quoted lines of post-war European cinema, a character in the 1976 Wim Wenders film…

Does a practical joke differ from a hoax? It could be a matter of scale. Anyone can deploy a whoopee…

The journalist Deepa Anappara turns to crime with her debut novel, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line (Chatto & Windus,…

A.D. Miller’s gripping new book is set largely during Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution, which Miller covered as a journalist. Ten…

The story of how Hugo Vickers eventually tracked down the former Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough is almost as fascinating…

If you are part of that multitude of Australians who fear that our country is drifting backwards – becoming less…

Many people have had a go at it. Ever since Oscar Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales in…

Jan van Eyck changed the art of picture-making more fundamentally than anyone
who has ever lived, says Martin Gayford

The Gift is three plays in one. It opens in a blindingly white Victorian parlour where a posh lady, Sarah,…

Beethoven wears a feather boa and pink shades. He wrangles an electric guitar. A red lightning flash streaks across that…

Writers like walking. When people ask us why, we say it’s what writers do. ‘Just popping out to buy a…

My step-grandmother Connie was an inspired needlewoman. For ten years, as a volunteer for the charity Fine Cell Work, she…

SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4, Sundays) is literally the only programme left on terrestrial TV that I can bear…

You might have thought Madonna was not a singer but a professional footballer judging by the talk before she took…

Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite won the Bafta for best foreign film and is up for six Oscars and it is an…

I find myself detached from mainstream culture. It started with the demise of nightclubs like Annabel’s and the arrival of…

I’ve no interest in food. None. But for the three other journalists on our press trip, eating was a consuming…

The builder boyfriend fell off a roof. He didn’t tell me until he could no longer leave unexplained why he…

I was once at a racing dinner in York where a distinguished clergyman in attendance was invited to say grace.…

As hosts of this year’s Lady Milne Trophy — the women’s home international series — England get to field two…

We had never met, but David Paravyan, from Russia, has been something of a personal idol since August 2018. My…

Black to move, Paravyan vs McShane, Isle of Man 2019. Here I intended 49…Bxd1. What had Paravyan planned after that…

In Competition No. 3134 you were invited to submit a poem featuring one of T.S. Eliot’s practical cats getting to…

The unclued lights are of a kind. Chambers does not include 17D.   Across 4    New cabinet door which bears…

The unclued lights (paired at 5/8, 24/3, 30D/30A and 42/35, and the singleton at 37) are titles of series of…

They never learn, do they? Lisa Nandy, the dark horse candidate in the Labour leadership race, has demanded the word…

Some years ago, two British supermarket chains needed to place a large order for replacement trollies. They had to decide…

Q. I have hired a private room in a restaurant in order to give dinner to a large number of…

In the mid-18th century, London was awash with gin. Socially-conscious members of the bourgeoisie believed that this was the root…

Billie Eilish, who has just won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the next Bond film. ‘James…