Unless the predicted Queensland cyclone skewers his plans, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected this weekend to call a federal…

A Chinese naval flotilla perambulating down the east coast of Australia sends two messages. One is, ‘Here we are and…

Albanese no match for Xi’s belligerence

Albo has got China all wrong

Look what happens when governments bash mining

Let’s copy New Zealand

Team Reality vs Team Fantasy

Offshore sites blown away

The war will end when Trump prevails

Australian civilisation made this country

But will it only get more green leftism?

When my old school, Presentation College, Reading, was demolished a decade ago, the Labour council desperately searched for famous old…

No country in the UK receives more public money per head than Scotland. An extra £2,200 is spent on every…

In 1990, an exotic Swiss-Canadian teenager of purportedly Habsburgian lineage descended on Cambridge in a cloud of cashmere. His wardrobe…

‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet,…

It was a routine antenatal appointment. I’d done it twice before and knew the format. The obstetrician runs through the…

I’m on the 10.45 slow train to Ipswich. It’s not even lunchtime, yet everyone around me is already gorging on…

Oscar, 26, joins me on Google Meet from Buenos Aires, having arrived earlier that day from New York – by…

In Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood, and Tuco,…

Military farce Sir: Your leading article (‘The age of realism’, 1 March) argues that the government must invest in the…

Back to the palace Donald Trump was invited for what will be his second state visit to the UK. Who…

To the Queen Anne splendour of the British ambassador’s residence in Washington for Peter Mandelson’s welcome party as our man…

Home After the humiliation of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in Washington, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, quickly convened…

The verbal pummelling of Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House last week was an ugly moment of bitter truth. We…

How can the right be so wrong? Or at least portions of the right – especially the American right –…

When Donald Trump addressed Congress this week, he declared he was ‘just getting started’. His words will not have soothed…

Just before Russia invaded Ukraine three years ago, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced a ‘friendship without limits’. The phrase seems…

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’,…

Forgive the mordant tone, but this article was written in a desolate post-industrial nightmare girdled by diversionary roads going nowhere…

I’ve been judging a beauty parade, but I hasten to add that no bikinis were involved. Four leading investment firms…

A world-renowned painter becomes the ghost of his former self, betraying his instincts to embrace sterile abstraction – and even outsourcing his work to ‘a fabricator in Zurich’

An ageing narrator looks back 50 years to ‘a most uncertain’ period of his life in Paris and his relationship with a mysterious, elusive ballet dancer

Gabriel Weston intersperses her guide to the structure and functions of the body’s organs with personal anecdotes and moral reflections

Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on

The poet complained bitterly of the barbarism of Tomis, on the Black Sea – but it was actually a thriving entrepot with a rich culture, like many of the Roman empire’s remoter cities

Just about everyone is for it, but we mean different things by it – whether it be the freedom of independence or the absence of coercive constraint

Simply to oppose and aggravate the West, the country supported a range of radical Palestinian organisations – but their violence and unpredictability became serious liabilities

The large, flightless birds that once inhabited the North Atlantic cliffs in their millions were extinct by the 1840s, as the demand for down-filled mattresses increased

The fluctuating fortunes of an ambitious young Hungarian in London provide a gripping study of the choices that can make or break a life

Simon Hart describes his frustrations as he grapples with the rivalries and petty jealousies of colleagues lobbying for peerages and knighthoods as the Tory party implodes

For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects

There is a Roman saying, ‘What the barbarians started the Barberinis completed’ with reference to one of the great dynastic…

Mickey 17 is the latest film from the South Korean writer-director Bong Joon-ho, who won an Oscar for Parasite and…

No truth is more self-evident than that there are those whose best emerges only when they are paired with others:…

The Score is a fine example of meat-and-potatoes theatre. Simple plotting, big characters, terrific speeches and a happy ending. The…

Tate Modern’s latest exhibition is a bizarre proposition on so many levels. Its subject, the Australian designer, performer, provocateur and…

Stephen Hough’s new piano concerto is called The World of Yesterday but its second ever performance offered a dispiriting glimpse…

Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection, at the Courtauld, consists of a selection of 25 absorbing paintings…

The baby reaches out to touch his mother’s scarf: he studies her face intently, and she focuses entirely on him.…

Coincidentally, two of this week’s big new dramas began with a fourth wall-busting declaration of their narrative methods. At the…

Following the BLM protests in the US, which were seized on by the Aussie media and in schools, Disney declared…

A Speccie reader, Lillian, has sent me this information about a brand-new word – governmentium. ‘Scientific research has led to…

Riches, ancient cities, great architecture, splendid landscape, agriculture to match, trade routes, romance. Records of human settlement stretching to the…

India A crowded bus station. A lady monkey with a baby clinging to its neck sidled past me, eyeing the banana…

I will admit to having been dismissive of red velvet cake in the past, considering it to be bland in…

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week…

Q. At the age of 50 my brother-in-law has discovered a talent for acting and singing. He has joined a…

My father was discharged from hospital with a plastic bag containing 13 boxes of pills and a vague promise that…

A few years ago, my old school magazine featured a pupil’s brief account of a geography field trip. Before the…