The Spectator
9 March 2019 Aus
The woke corporation: how campus madness entered the workplace
Australia
Private Pyne deserts
In 2016, the Turnbull government committed Australia to a $50 billion deal with the French to buy a dozen conventional…
Australian Columnists
Brown study
A few weeks ago we drew attention to some significant reforms to the electoral law in the Democratic Republic of…
Simon Collins
If there is anything which can be relied upon to bring a nation together better than the achievements of its…
Catholic notes
My personal thoughts on Cardinal Pell’s conviction From what I can tell, this is the crime for which George Cardinal…
Australian Features
Education and the modern declaration
The 2008 Melbourne Declaration, endorsed by state, territory and commonwealth education ministers, is the strategic ‘road map’ that has directed…
Lies, groceries and feminist statistics
Successful politics is impossible without lies. Politicians know being truthful doesn’t work. Voters, for all their claims about wanting honest…
Prosecuting Pell
The important question is not simply whether the verdict in this case is sound but whether a responsible Public Prosecutor…
Bad riddance
When the Left talks derisively about ‘climate deniers’, they probably imagine someone very different from Dr Peter Ridd. Bearded, bespectacled…
Abbott – the next Liberal leader?
It might be a little unfair to describe the announced departures of very senior Liberals Julie Bishop and Christopher Pyne…
PM in the Last Chance Saloon
Australia, we’re told, will soon be under a government of thieves and constitutional vandals, pledged to change laws from the…
An instrument of unconditional surrender
In a previous article in these pages (Battle of Britain, Mk II, 1 Dec 2018) I argued that the European…
Features
The woke corporation: how campus madness entered the workplace
New employees at the British headquarters of Accenture, a global management consultancy, were slightly taken aback during a recent induction…
Would any publisher dare to print Lolita now?
The other day Will Self unburdened himself on the state of fiction with crushing hauteur. ‘What’s now regarded as serious…
Would your son marry me? Inside Shanghai’s marriage market
Shanghai ‘How old are you, young lady?’ A small, curious crowd starts to surround me. ‘How tall are you? What…
I watched Jadon Sancho grow up. That’s why I know he’s Britain’s next footballing megastar
How much is Jadon Sancho worth? Fifty million? A hundred million? As the speculation mounts, the numbers keep growing. Jadon…
Justin Trudeau has fallen from grace – and he has no one to blame but himself
An Italian friend who lives in Rome texted me to ask about the current political crisis in Canada that is…
Delhi notebook: Nuclear war is not around the corner
India is not preparing for war, but picking up the newspapers in Delhi you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.…
It may seem incredible, but I’d trust an Italian over a Frenchman any day
For a few years before coming to Italy, I lived in Paris and I cannot tell you the life-enhancing difference…
The Week
Why MPs must hold their nose and back May’s Brexit deal
It is becoming painfully clear that on Tuesday the House of Commons will be asked to vote on an EU…
Portrait of the week: Britain’s knife crime epidemic, a trip to Brussels and Emmanuel Macron’s EU plea
Home Two 17-year-olds were stabbed to death in London and Manchester, bringing the number of teenagers killed in knife crime…
Might George W. Bush be the last Republican president in American history?
John McDonnell might think Churchill a villain, but he’s beloved in America. I’ve just returned from a ten-week, 18-state, 27-city,…
Can you really teach students to solve knife crime?
Next year the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) will offer one degree, in design, technology and the humanities, to teach students…
Is knife crime rising everywhere?
Trolley dollies Virgin Atlantic dropped its requirement for air hostesses to wear make-up at work. What was required of the…
Kingsley Amis on Lolita: It’s not pornographic enough
From ‘She was a child and I was a child’ by Kingsley Amis, 6 November 1959: The only success of…
Australian letters
Sidelined Sir: I strenuously object to David Flint’s assertion (“Footballers have rights too”, March 2) that Australia’s National Rugby League…
Columnists
Artists are not always good people, but should their work really be boycotted?
A kind billionaire called Jeremy Hosking, whom I do not know personally, has invited us to join the Britannia Express,…
Will Brexiteers miss their best chance at Brexit?
Theresa May was only ever going to win approval for her Brexit deal by persuading MPs that it was the…
In defence of a liberal education
A good decade or so ago I wrote a fairly vituperative article in response to a piece by the writer…
We’ve still to wake up from the nightmare of the Swinging Sixties
Every day our age seems to be getting madder and madder, in defiance of the notion that man is a…
Don’t hate housebuilders who profited from Help to Buy. It wasn’t their fault
Was Help to Buy a timely market intervention with a valid social purpose or a political gimmick that unintentionally showered…
Books
Two big books on motherhood and childlessness: Catherine Mayer got emotional
A single survey, elevated by news organisations to scientific certainty, suggests that air travellers may be more susceptible to tears…
One of the world’s great love stories
‘I still think he was a bastard.’ This is the opinion that Julia, daughter of the novelist Arthur, has about…
America’s empire – a story of the secret and the convenient
Where other nations disbanded their empires following the second world war, America’s underwent transubstantiation, from something solid to something more…
Making the case for multilingualism – a timely reminder
English as the world’s lingua franca isn’t going anywhere. Why, then, should we Anglophones bother to learn another language? What’s…
Sadie Jones’s modern morality tale
The love of money, says St Paul, is the root of all evil. The Snakes makes much the same point.…
In (vain) search of the snow leopard
Alex Dehgan is clearly someone with a penchant for hazardous jobs. Even in the first few pages we find him…
Lotharingia: Charlemagne’s much disputed legacy
In 1919, only months after the end of the Great War, a French airman called Jacques Trolley de Prevaux, accompanied…
A delicious novel from one of our most inventive contemporary voices
‘Food experiences,’ writes Michael Flanagan in his paper ‘Cowpie, Gruel and Midnight Feasts: Food in Popular Children’s Literature’, ‘form part…
Faber’s new ‘poetry’ collection
If you’re unsure whether Shaun Ryder’s lyrics for Happy Mondays and Black Grape really deserve the full Faber-poetry treatment, then…
Arts
Enjoy a blast of Spanish sun from Joaquin Sorolla
Artists can be trained, but they are formed by their earliest impressions: a child of five may not be able…
Magnificently incoherent: Royal Trux’s White Stuff reviewed
Grade:A Royal Trux are back — kind of. Singer (if that’s what you want to call what she does) Jennifer…
Cringingly vulgar, brainless and lacking heart: ENO’s Merry Widow reviewed
Garrick Ohlsson is one of the finest pianists of his generation. Why, then, was the Wigmore Hall not much more…
An undervalued songwriter and decent man: Bryan Adams at Wembley reviewed
On 29 June 1991, a record called ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams entered the…
A great example of how Radio 4 is using new technologies to enhance audio
‘It’s too familiar, too obvious,’ says Cathy FitzGerald at the beginning of her new interactive series for Radio 4, Moving…
For many artists being propagandists has become their raison d’être
If you want to lose friends and alienate people in the art world, try telling them you support Britain leaving…
Deserves its classic status: Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at the Young Vic reviewed
Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train by Stephen Adly Guirgis deserves its classic status. This wordy and highly cerebral play pulls…
Promising but, compared to the first series, short of laughs: Fleabag reviewed
BBC2’s MotherFatherSon announced its status as a classy thriller in the traditional way: by ensuring that for quite a long…
Finally a Marvel film that doesn’t entirely bore the pants off Deborah Ross
Captain Marvel is the 654th film in the Marvel franchise — the figure is something like that, I think —…
Kathryn Stott – Artistic Director
Townsville is bouncing back; it is also tuning up for the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. Battered by the recent…
Life
Watching my grandchildren schussing down a mountain is what makes me happy now
Gstaad As everyone knows, the definition of serendipity is searching for a needle in a haystack, and instead finding…
I hadn’t had a drink in six weeks but that was seven hours, three pubs and a club ago…
Standing in a messy kitchen at the tendril tip of a county line at three o’clock in the morning, Trev…
My life is like that new Netflix series Russian Doll – a series of recurring crises
Russian Doll is a brilliant new Netflix drama in which a woman relives the same night over and over again.…
For now, here in Laikipia we have the only population of black panthers in the world
Laikipia A female black panther was recently photographed at our neighbours’ place. Exactly like Kipling’s Bagheera, she was ‘inky…
Susanna Gross
Geir Helgemo is the most revered bridge player in the world — and that isn’t about to change just because…
no. 544
White to play. This position is from Hebden-Williams, Bunratty 2019. How did White finish in fine style? Answers to me…
Political noir
In Competition No. 3088 you were invited to submit a short story in the style of hard-boiled crime fiction set…
2398: All steamed up
The unclued lights (five of two words, two pairs and a singleton) are of a kind, verifiable in Brewer. …
2395: Concise Crossword
The seven concise clues lead to: heALth centre (3,31), HEARTbreak (9), midrIFf (26), last of alL (40), out of afRIca…
Gone are the days when the middle class could afford to go skiing
It won’t be news to readers of The Spectator that one of the long-term effects of globalisation is the hollowing…
Meet Chris Gayle, the coolest man in sport
It can’t be a coincidence that two of the coolest sportsmen on the planet are from the same place, Jamaica.…
Dear Mary: what should we do about a possible thief in our school dormitory?
Q. I run a very small mail-order company from home. Recently I received an exceptionally rude email from a disgruntled…
Pale pomp and £100 Beijing duck: Imperial Treasure reviewed
Imperial Treasure is a restaurant in the part of St James’s where Leopold von Hoesch, the German ambassador to George…
‘One fell swoop’ has become a cliche, but where does it come from?
The Sun, reviewing a new laptop from Huawei, mentioned a combined fingerprint sensor and on-switch that lets users ‘power up and…
