And so the great farming nation that rode to prosperity on the sheep’s back and through harvesting wheat now looks…

This year the world will enjoy its greatest grain crop on record. Let me say that again. This year the…

Among the delusions I use to warm myself in the bleak midwinter, channeling Dr Who is not one. But as…

Fairfax reporters have form when it comes to replacing journalism with anti-Israeli activism

Fifty years ago, The Lucky Country helped create a whole new breed of Australian

Fifty years ago, Donald Horne’s enigmatic phrase captured a nation’s imagination. But what did he make of his success, and what did it cost him? Donald’s son Nick and his former colleague Michael Baume dig back into the past

How Donald Horne went from a flamboyant fun-loving Tory to a herald of the new age of Whitlam

It’s a pity Donald Horne didn’t call The Lucky Country ‘Women, Booze and Bedspreads’ instead.  Better still, that could have…

There is a global crisis on a scale not seen for 20 years. And all we do is throw money at the problem

It’s the dishonest debate on immigration that poisons the atmosphere for refugees

Revived Republican radicalism will be to the Democrats' advantage in 2016

The German Chancellor has rather a lot in common with David Cameron. That's why she can't help him

Uncertainty over how much reform the pope wants is splitting his church into factions

The party’s economics spokesman is one of those driving Ukip towards professionalism

It wasn’t lack of firearms that kept them from shooting. It was something else

In my three years as a hospital visitor, the picture hasn’t got any better

I still won't wear a bike helmet – until, I suppose, a famous person has a bad bike crash

Manchester rejected an elected mayor. George Osborne should respect that

Home Fiona Woolf, the Lord Mayor of London, resigned as the head of an inquiry into historical child sex abuse…

Plus: Oscar Wilde’s birthday, loins for the loinless, and Dame Edna Everage’s latest campaign

Plus: Feminist souvenirs that T-shirt makers can save up for

The ancients would have found the idea absurd. And they proved it wrong

From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 7 November 1914: On Wednesday next the King will open Parliament in state,…

Well-meaning Whitlam Sir: Over recent months we have been subjected to an unprecedented amount of vainglory from the ALP and…

You can't run a '35 per cent strategy' when the Greens have knocked your vote into the low thirties

Labour is perhaps more a party of London, these days, than either the Liberal Democrats or the Conservatives

I’ve never seen so many customers grinning as they left the bookshop

Discovering a parallel culture in my old home town

Plus: Our place in the Prosperity Index, and polishing a pedestal for Michael O’Leary

A review of The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye. Rigour and knowledge make way for cute anecdotes

A review of Blue Note: An Uncompromising Expression, by Richard Havers. A birthday ode to the greatest jazz record label of all time

A review of Amnesia, by Peter Carey. It comes across like a preliminary draft

A review of Owning the Past: Why the English Collected Antique Sculpture, 1640 - 1840, by Ruth Guilding. Treats include an illustration of a pair of cleaning ladies in the hall at Castle Howard

A review of Bolano: A biography in Conversations. More of a whimsical detective novel than a real biography

Still, the pictures are nice. A review of New York Mid-Century: Post War Capital of Culture, 1945 - 1965, with contributions by Annie Cohen-Solal, Paul Goldberger and Robert Gottlieb

A review of Unchosen: The Memoirs of a Philo-Semite, by Julie Burchill. You can sum up this memoir in a sentence: Jews are smarter than the rest of the world, so suck it up gentile losers!

A review of Partisan Diary: A Woman's Life in the Italian Resistance, by Ada Gobetti, translated and edited by Jomarie Alano. This vital historical document was revered by Italo Calvino

A review of A Writer's Garden: How Gardens Inspired Our Best-Loved Authors, by Jackie Bennett, with photographs by Richard Hanson. This visually appealing book includes everything from John Clare's cottage garden to Robert Burns's farm

A review of Havel: A Life, by Michael Zantovsky. He was one of three key players in the death of communism. But he outstayed his welcome disastrously

A review of Funny Girl, by Nick Hornby. Subtle but unashamedly populist, Hornby's latest is a fan letter to the great 70s comedy writers

There's a risk you'll just be left with scraps, even by the wonderful Rose Tremain. That said, several of the short stories in The American Lover, mostly re-imaginings of other writers' work, are fantastic

A review of Joan Littlewood: Dreams and Realities, by Peter Rankin. Shakespeare was too politically middle-of-the-road to make the grade and the second world war was 'boring'

A review of Any Other Business, by Martin Vander Weyer. An ode to the latest in a fine line of Spectator City correspondents

Through the centre of town, the river takes up more space than Hyde Park. And most of the proposals around it represent a huge missed opportunity

Please let the obliteration begin so we can all go home, writes Deborah Ross

The Viennese artist painted most of the works in this exhibition when he was just 20 - and it shows

Plus: its Betrothal in a Monastery at the Wales Millennium Centre was flawless

Plus: TV beckons for the author of the Finborough's award-winning new play

Let's send one to Syria and find out...

Plus: before the TED talks, there was Radio 4

But lack of money might be the reason why the producers of The Heart of Country (BBC4) had such a banal script

What boats tell us about the state of the world

When he saw me coming he’d make a dash for it

Like any home-educated child she has turned out a little bohemian

It was touching how Washington honoured Ben Bradlee. Monica Lewinsky can't look forward to similar treatment

To get good results at bridge, it’s not enough to play well — your opponents need to play badly; and…

On Saturday 8 November the first game will be played in the three-week long rematch between defending world champion Magnus…

White to play. This position is from Carlsen-Anand, Amber Rapidplay 2008. White is a pawn ahead but Black has counterplay.…

In Competition No. 2872 you were invited to submit an author’s acknowledgments page that contains subtle indications that no thanks…

The ten unclued lights consist of a theme word and three groups of three answers of a kind, each group…

Unclued lights each contained a different TREY (20) from the alphabet: AFGHAN (24), CANOPY (27), DINGHIES (42), DABCHICK (1D), HYMNODY…

What isn't genetic you pick up from your peers. Teachers – and parents – have irritatingly little to do with it

Like sexual behaviour, shopping behaviour is unbelievably strange

Plus: A painless turn for country house weekends, and a way to make supermarket visits entertaining

For each of those I know, their career is a vocation

And is that why Samuel Johnson left it out of his dictionary