At this time of year, during the so-called ‘silly season’, it’s normally desperate journos who have to concoct preposterous stories…

I am sorry to have to tell you this, but anarchists are not what they used to be. I reluctantly…

Greens determine Labor response The Australian Greens will determine the ALP’s response to the Trade Union Royal Commission. If Labor…

What a long Parliamentary year it has been. But at last, as the Senate clock approaches midnight on the last…

Was the poor North Sydney by-election result an omen of things to come?

Australian politics lacks an anti-political correctness leader

NSW’s notorious Star Chamber is undermining the very causes it is meant to promote

Is the innovation agenda really capable of delivering jobs?

How to stop corrupt unions running our super funds

Isis is losing territory. Recruits are deserting. But the hardcore fanatics will never surrender

I offered to get Abu Rumaysah a one-way ticket to Syria only weeks before he fled

British taxes support a regime that even allies admit uses murder to crush political challenge

We’ll never agree. But I do understand him better now

No matter how well the Scottish Conservative leader is regarded, her party is still toxic north of the border

I was cool, I was convivial. And then he opened his coat and showed me his tits

A family pilgrimage reveals how little has changed in this charming Cotswolds town

For as long as the era of cheap credit lasts, house prices will remain sky high

Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership…

Plus: Charlie Hebdo and the disgusting defenders of the assassin’s veto; secrets of the House of SpeakEasy

Plus: The most flood-prone places in Britain; delicacies of Kyrgyzstan

Wine with meals is something they might have at home. Getting smashed, on the other hand, is part of a classical education

From ‘A Mobilisation of the Church’, The Spectator, 8 January 1916: Suppose the Church were mobilised so that the majority of…

Rule of law Sir: A few days ago former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, was sentenced to an 18…

As the Labour leader’s strength grows, more and more moderates will be discarded

At the end of next week, a judge will decide whether the ‘trial of the facts’ can proceed now that…

In an ideal world both sides in the Sunni-Shia war would lose, with heavy injuries, but we do not want a Saudi Spring

David Cameron, like Tony Blair, succumbs to the urge to sex things up even when he has a perfectly arguable case

He’ll make a splendid book some day: Alan Clark meets Alan Partridge

Plus: Investment opportunities across the Channel; and a story of philanthropic capitalism from the new year honours list

Serhii Plokhy's work explains how this vast, once distant steppe between forest and sea is now regarded as ‘the Gates of Europe’

In poetry and memoir, the composer Richard Skelton celebrates his rugged native Cumbria — the chief inspiration for his visionary electronic soundscapes

How Not to Smuggle would have been a better title for Francis Morland’s The Art of Smuggling — about his years as a gentleman drug trafficker

Leila Guerriero tells A Simple Story of one gaucho’s electrifying performance of the malambo — an obscure Argentinian dance more arduous than any feat of athletics

Dominic Ziegler travels the vast length of the Amur river that forms a natural (if uneasy) boundary between two world powers

Victims long dead exact their revenge in novels from Ian Rankin, Francesca Kay, Lynda La Plante and Helen Dunmore

While obsessing over ‘evil thoughts’ and self-indulgence in his journals, Hopkins still glories in God’s grandeur and the pattern of creation

The 2005 Hungarian blockbuster is finally available in English. It has probably taken this long to translate it

Monuments used to come down with much greater regularity than today. The mob of Bologna once even destroyed a Michelangelo masterpiece

The museum has done an inspiring job in repurposing some of its great marvels for its new post-Schengen galleries

Plus: a new Stoppard play at Hampstead Theatre whose ideal audience would be a theatre full of Sir Toms

The film derives much of its power from the central performances. And though it’s hard to watch, there are moments of joy

And Nicole Car’s Tatyana was superb. Pity about Kasper Holten’s gimmicky production

Plus: how child migrants treat their arduous journeys like a game

Andrew Davies’s superb adaptation for BBC1 understands this and was a blessing after the special time-travel edition of what everyone is now rightly calling Shitlock

Ceylon was the exotic setting for the opera The Pearl Fishers. It premiered in Paris in 1863; its composer Georges…

It’s taken me a long time to realise it but family life beats chasing skirt

Mum only spent three hours on a trolley in a corridor, which wasn’t bad under the circumstances

My undignified dance prompted Darcy to shift up a gear into sixth

The survival of this death-defying bird is one in the eye for the socially aspirational nouveaux riches of Northants

A single crowd-pulling hero could break the south’s stranglehold on jump racing

Call me nuts but on 29 December I left lovely, sunny, delicious France for the fairly unlovely Royal National Hotel…

The London Classic, the end of the million-dollar Grand Tour, was something of a damp squib. A surfeit of draws…

Black to play. This is a variation from Carlsen-Grischuk, London Classic 2015. Carlsen won but this week’s puzzle shows how…

In Competition No. 2929 you were invited to submit an acrostic poem containing some predictions for the next decade, in…

Clues in italics are cryptic indications of partial answers. In each case, the indicated part must be 5 39 (five…

The thematic term (formed by letters cut from definitions, 17, and letters added to definitions) is SCISSORS-AND-PASTE. Unclued lights are…

The witch hunt against Napoleon Chagnon shows us what happens if scientists challenge the core beliefs of ‘progressives’

If you ain’t got a strip club in your bedroom, you ain’t no cricket player, according to the T20 cash machine

Plus: What should you do if your wife is obsessed with Tim Peake?

It’s like the Wizard of Oz, or a relationship; the magic melts with intimacy

From Establishment to young fogey