State governments are sheltered workshops for mediocre politicians rarely good enough to make it in the Canberra big league. They…

It seems just a mere few weeks ago that I was toasting a crumpet in the prefects’ room at St…

I arrive at Melbourne airport for my midnight flight with an unfortunately timed cold. My lack of sleep after Canberra’s…

Put off the funeral arrangements; the incompetent South Australian government has, unintentionally, just given the kiss of life to coal…

A few weeks ago a trove of hacked documents detailed the international web of organisations nurtured by George Soros via…

Once, long ago, I made the mistake of signing a change.org petition. I have received unwanted correspondence from them ever…

Despite the worsening crisis in indigenous child welfare, the Aboriginal industry is continuing to make the same misleading claims about…

Out of the fog of rumour and accusation surrounding the melancholy break-up of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, one source…

‘We are used to death,’ said Ismail. He had been to the funerals of four friends in a single week,…

The make-up lady at the BBC’s Millbank studio in Westminster has noticed a change in Boris Johnson’s look. ‘His hair…

Last week more than 130 right-wing thinkers put their names to a defiant document — a list of ‘Scholars and…

Last week, students at York University staged a walkout from the sexual consent classes organised by their student union women’s…

A study came out last week that should have caused great alarm. For 13 years, researchers at the University of Copenhagen studied…

A year from now, 60 million Germans go to the polls in the most important general election in mainland Europe…

Something strange is happening in the long decline of Christian Britain. We know that church attendance has plummeted two thirds…

Down a lane in Keighley, in the old West Riding of Yorkshire, they brew the greatest ale in the world.…

Any day now, the government will make its long delayed announcement on whether a third runway should be built at…

Tenement Scots John Cleese referred to the editor of this magazine as a ‘tenement Scot’. Do more Scots live in…

Jeremy Corbyn has been re-elected leader of the Labour party not by MPs but by his teenage ‘fans’ in Momentum.…

From ‘More men’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: Are we or are we not to apply compulsory service to Ireland? The…

Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said at the Conservative party conference that hers was now the party of ‘working-class’…

The Conservative party conference in Birmingham this week seemed a remarkably relaxed affair. The European question has been settled. Seldom…

Pollies pryorities Sir: If only’ the changes to the upper houses of Parliament recommended by Noreen Pryor could be enacted,…

Theresa May doesn’t use an autocue for her speeches. She feels that reading off a screen at the back of…

Birmingham Checking in to my hotel room on the 18th floor, for the Conservative party conference here, I opened the…

The good people of Hungary went to the polls on Sunday and voted by more than 98 per cent against…

What you really should have done if you were in Birmingham on Monday this week was skip the not notably…

‘I rang and said can I have a council house, I’ve nowhere to go, an’ the bloke said no you…

If Donald Trump keeps campaigning on immigration, he cannot lose. His Democrat rival for the US presidency, Hillary Clinton, has…

Angela Carter was a seminal, a watershed novelist: perhaps one of the last generation of novelists to change both the…

Everyone has played it, or one of its manifold variations and rip-offs. Blocks of different shapes fall from the sky;…

When it comes to speaking of foreign affairs, Rory Stewart is one of the few MPs who does not peddle…

The SAS was the first unit to be granted regimental status for generations. Its chief aim was to damage the…

It is not uncommon for writers to be obsessed by bookshops. Some even find their writing feet through loving a…

Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it…

The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in…

Here’s a book to make an Egyptologist of everyone. A compendium of accepted gen on the gift of the Nile,…

‘Leonard Michaels (1933–2003) was one of the most admired and influential American writers of the last half century,’ states the…

Nell Zink’s route to publication became something of a story in itself: one that involved an email exchange about birds…

Norman Ohler is rather hard on the Nazis, for compared to what our little group got up to in the…

Helen Gurley Brown’s internationally influential career, as the author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, is…

Kate Tempest, a 30 year old dramatist and poet, has an appeal that’s hard to fathom. Is it all in…

Richard Jones’s new production of Don Giovanni at ENO bears some passing resemblances to the opera as envisaged by its…

At my wife’s first 12-week scan, I was expecting — and duly got — that much-documented sense of thrilled wonder…

Here are three roles all actors love to play. The drunk (no need to learn your lines), the dementia victim…

Giselle endures in the collective imagination as a charming, sorrowful, supernatural love story. Premièred in Paris in 1841, this keystone…

You will surely have seen the posters for The Girl on the Train with Emily Blunt staring from a train…

When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals…

For much of the Middle Ages, especially from 1250–1350, ‘English work’ was enormously prized around Europe from Spain to Iceland.…

Quite how one person is expected to oversee not just radio but also ‘arts, music, learning and children’s departments’ was…

Born in Yorkshire 79 years ago, he fell in love with the idea of California as a child via Hollywood…

It often strikes me that learning to bid is just like mastering a language. As you take on new conventions…

The post The Battle for Britain appeared first on The Spectator.

New York Back in the Big Bagel once again preparing for the greatest debate ever, one that will decide the…

In Competition No. 2968 you were-invited to take the title of a short story by Ted Hughes, How the Whale…

‘Americans,’ said my husband in much the same tone that Betsey Trotwood said ‘Donkeys’. It was his way of explaining…

After a year dealing with estate agents I can only say: a plague on all their houses, except the one…

Concealed Shakespearean characters were Rivers, Celia, Celia (again), Hamlet, Costard, Polonius, Snug, Hero, Gallus, Martius, Pistol, Collatine (The Rape of…

Q. A family of five from Brazil who are close friends of mine are visiting London next week. They have…

The first and only time I went to a meeting of Sex Addicts Anonymous, this chap stood up and gave…

In olden days, before the internet arrived, shopping was quite simple. You’d go into a shop and buy something, and…

White to play. This is from Tal-Botvinnik, World Championship (Game 12), Moscow 1961. Tal’s next move did not force an…

Each of eleven clues comprises a definition part and a hidden consecutive jumble of the answer including one extra letter;…

I’m writing this from the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham where the mood is buoyant, to put it mildly. Everyone…

We already drive on the left, give road distances in miles and drink pints. So one good feature of Brexit…

We were surpassing Sydney Smith. His idea of heaven was pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets. Our…

As I write, the Mikhail Tal Memorial tournament in Moscow is still underway. The Dutch grandmaster Anish Giri stormed into…