The Spectator
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
Bishop Long: just plain wrong When looking at the political world of Woke, we can’t discount the foolishness of religious…
Euro notes
Reds under the downing street beds Two unorthodox senior advisors to Number 10 deserve attention. The first and most prominent…
Australian Features
Abandon all principles ye who enter the Libs
Morrison’s ‘pragmatism’ is destroying conservatism
Kelly, Flint, Andrews, Christensen, Stoker. I’m spotting a pattern here
No home for conservatives in the Libs?
Voice, treaty, truth?
We are lying to ourselves about the reasons behind Aboriginal disadvantage
The enemy within, the enemy without
Far Left still rules while the communists laugh at our subs
Features
Dandelions
Dandelions are one of the cheeriest wild flowers. They are loved by children for their ‘clock’ seed heads, are entirely…
The Week
Talking point
Gossip appears to be good for the mental health. That should make the females of the ancient world some of…
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,’…
Data, not dates
A slogan can come back to haunt you. For Boris Johnson, the words ‘data not dates’ sounded powerful at a…
Columnists
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…
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…
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…
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
There should be more ‘religious literacy’. So says the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Religion in the Media, chaired by Yasmin…
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
Missing chapters
Between them, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have a wealth of research and writing experience, and their biography of…
On the edge
After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and…
Theft by stealth
Robert Prowe has writer’s block. An Englishman reaching middle age, he lives in Berlin with his Swedish wife and their…
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…
More grand projects
Not content with imposing his will on nations, Napoleon tried to subdue nature too, says David Crane
Family feeling
Maki Kashimada won the 2012 Akutagawa Prize for Touring the Land of the Dead, the strange, unsettling novella that makes…
Mission to Mars
For many of us, Elon Musk is a hard man to like. He’s the richest man in the world (or…
The great image-maker
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
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…
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Wealth and misfortune
The potter and author Edmund de Waal revisits familiar terrain at an angle in his third book, Letters to Camondo.…
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
Reese Witherspoon
There are moments when the very idea of live entertainment including its high cultural expression, thrills the soul. On 6…
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…
Great Scottie
On eBay I have an alert set for ‘Scottie Wilson’. Nine times out of ten, it’s a diamanté Scottie dog…
A grief observed
Nomadland won multiple Oscars including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress, and if there’d been an award for Best…
Monkey business
Money is a new internet play about financial corruption starring Mel Giedroyc. She appears on-screen for less time than it…
Wright and wrong
Ian Wright: Home Truths began with the ex-footballer saying that the home he grew up in was ‘not a happy…
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…
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…
‘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
Inside stories
Prison-based podcast Banged Up, now in its second series, is far more uplifting — and less soapy — than its…
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 Language
Brauer College in Warrnambool, Victoria made the news for having required all the boys at an assembly to ‘stand up…
In memoriam
In Competition No. 3197, you were invited to supply a poem to mark the death of Prince Philip. I wondered…
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…
Shame on you!
As his tweed jacket flapped open to one side of his stomach, my husband stood up unsteadily and arched his…
Return to Alsace
Freedom approaches. Should we be humming ‘Va, Pensiero’ or ‘O Welche Lust’ — perhaps both. Thinking of Fidelioreminds me of…
The tech trap
Back in late 2019 I met someone from Zoom who was visiting London. The company, then as now, offered free…
Puzzle no. 652
White to play and mate in two moves. Composed by Revd Ernest Clement Mortimer, The Problemist, 1942. Answers should be…
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…
2505: Endgame
The unclued lights (one hyphened) are of a kind, confirmed in Chambers. Elsewhere, ignore one accent. Across 1 I…
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














































































