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The Spectator

8 May 2021 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Best exotic Victorian hotel

Could there be a more perfect metaphor for not only the multiple failures of the Andrews Labor government but also…

Australian Columnists

Latham's Law

Latham’s law

Bishop Long: just plain wrong When looking at the political world of Woke, we can’t discount the foolishness of religious…

Guest notes

Euro notes

Reds under the downing street beds Two unorthodox senior advisors to Number 10 deserve attention. The first and most prominent…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Abandon all principles ye who enter the Libs

Morrison’s ‘pragmatism’ is destroying conservatism

Features Australia

The identity bigots

On ScoMo’s religious beliefs

Features Australia

Voice, treaty, truth?

We are lying to ourselves about the reasons behind Aboriginal disadvantage

Features Australia

Teaching gobbledygook

Toss out the national curriculum

Features Australia

The enemy within, the enemy without

Far Left still rules while the communists laugh at our subs

Features

Features

Customer disservice

The insidious creep of corporate friendliness

Features

Affronted

The problem with London’s fake facades

Features

‘I can just be myself’

Can Anas Sarwar woo Scottish voters back?

Notes on...

Dandelions

Dandelions are one of the cheeriest wild flowers. They are loved by children for their ‘clock’ seed heads, are entirely…

Features

A stitch in time

What to include in a memory box of the plague year?

Features

Parent trap

Welcome to the cripplingly expensive world of childcare, Boris

Features

China envy

From spending to lockdown, the West is copying Beijing

Features

Trail of tears

Why India is reluctant to lock down again

The Week

Barometer

Barometer

Flat spin Which prime minister spent the most on their Downing Street flat, according to figures reported over the years?…

Letters

Letters

Christian approach Sir: Dr Michael Nazir-Ali’s criticism of our report ‘From Lament to Action’ (‘Bad faith’, 1 May) was wide…

Ancient and modern

Talking point

Gossip appears to be good for the mental health. That should make the females of the ancient world some of…

Diary

Diary

By the time you read this you may know if the Tories triumphed in the Hartlepool by-election — or if,…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week

Home ‘I think we have got a good chance of being able to dispense with the one-metre-plus from 21 June,’…

Leading article

Data, not dates

A slogan can come back to haunt you. For Boris Johnson, the words ‘data not dates’ sounded powerful at a…

Columnists

Any other business

The inflation scare is overdone but watch out for the price spike

‘We are seeing very substantial inflation,’ the great investor Warren Buffett told shareholders in his master company Berkshire Hathaway at…

Columns

Who regulates the regulators?

This isn’t about David Cameron and Greensillgate; it isn’t about Boris Johnson and wallpapergate or Jennifer-Arcurigate. It isn’t about Westferrygate…

Columns

What’s next for the Union?

The Union faces two simultaneous challenges in Northern Ireland and Scotland that both look set to worsen in the coming…

Columns

Britain’s mental health problem

Experts tell us that we are facing a mental health ‘time bomb’ in the UK, partly as a consequence of…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s Notes

There should be more ‘religious literacy’. So says the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religion in the Media, chaired by Yasmin…

Columns

The true cost of make-believe money

I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practising left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency…

Books

Australian Books

Missing chapters

Between them, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have a wealth of research and writing experience, and their biography of…

More from Books

On the edge

After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…

More from Books

Theft by stealth

Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…

More from Books

The world held its breath

Nuclear weapons carry a payload of cold logic: if both sides have them, neither will ever use them. But in…

Lead book review

More grand projects

Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane

More from Books

Family feeling

Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…

More from Books

Mission to Mars

For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…

More from Books

The great image-maker

‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…

More from Books

A tendency to intolerance

Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give…

More from Books

A natural sensualist

Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…

More from Books

Wealth and misfortune

The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…

More from Books

Eliminate the positive

Sam Byers’s worryingly zeitgeisty second novel, Perfidious Albion, imagined a post-Brexit dystopia dominated by global tech companies, corrupt spin doctors,…

Arts

Australian Arts

Reese Witherspoon

There are moments when the very idea of live entertainment including its high cultural expression, thrills the soul. On 6…

Culture Buff

Francesco Cavalli’s The Loves of Apollo & Dafne

Venice in the 17th century was the birthplace of opera.  Its dominant and most successful exponent was Francesco Cavalli.  Once…

More from Arts

Great Scottie

On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog…

Film

A grief observed

Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best…

Theatre

Monkey business

Money is a new internet play about financial corruption starring Mel Giedroyc. She appears on-screen for less time than it…

Television

Wright and wrong

Ian Wright: Home Truths began with the ex-footballer saying that the home he grew up in was ‘not a happy…

Classical

Master of the notes

Stepping into the Sistine Chapel, the choir loft is probably the last thing you’d notice. ‘Loft’ is, frankly, a stretch…

The Listener

Tom Jones: Surrounded by Time

Grade: C Revisionism has been extraordinarily kind to Tom Jones, ever since he barked his way through Prince’s ‘Kiss’ with…

Arts feature

‘Where are the Rambos?’

James Delingpole talks to comic-book writer Mark Millar about the joy of Catholicism, our sorry lack of male action figures and his childhood superpower

Radio

Inside stories

Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie Life

As a child I had a version of OCD called Just Right syndrome. This doesn’t mean I lived entirely on…

Aussie Life

Aussie Language

Brauer College in Warrnambool, Victoria made the news for having required all the boys at an assembly to ‘stand up…

Bridge

Bridge

The Lady Milne is the annual Women’s Championship between the home countries (and Ireland) and is most often a two-horse…

Competition

In memoriam

In Competition No. 3197, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the death of Prince Philip. I wondered…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q. I am placed in a social dilemma due to a proposed visit on the last weekend of June by…

Real life

Real life

‘You’re meant to be having your dental appointment now!’ barked the receptionist, bringing my lie-in to an abrupt end. Very…

No sacred cows

Time to dust off my old records

In the introduction to an anthology of his jazz record reviews, the poet Philip Larkin imagines his readers. They’re not…

Mind your language

Shame on you!

As his tweed jacket flapped open to one side of his stomach, my husband stood up unsteadily and arched his…

Drink

Return to Alsace

Freedom approaches. Should we be humming ‘Va, Pensiero’ or ‘O Welche Lust’ — perhaps both. Thinking of Fidelioreminds me of…

The Wiki Man

The tech trap

Back in late 2019 I met someone from Zoom who was visiting London. The company, then as now, offered free…

Low life

Low life

The only thing left for me now is to embrace humility and take up basket weaving. In our dog and…

High life

High life

New York With the Karamazovian hangover now only a weekly occurrence, the healthy life rules supreme. Well, most of the…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 652

White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Revd Ernest Clement Mortimer, The Problemist, 1942. Answers should be…

Chess

Dead brain cells

As round 14 of the Candidates tournament unfolded, I had the feeling of watching an anti-climactic post-exam bender. Ian Nepomniachtchi…

Wild life

Wild life

Laikipia Until I promised to slaughter a fat-tailed sheep with a goat thrown in for a feast, the farm cowhands…

Crossword

2505: Endgame

The unclued lights (one hyphened) are of a kind, confirmed in Chambers. Elsewhere, ignore one accent.   Across 1 I…

Crossword solution

to 2502: Nay-sayers?

The unclued lights are HORSES. First prize Bob Toland, Ramsey, Cambs Runners-up Gareth Davies, Langstone, Gwent; Catherine Knox, London SW4