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The Spectator

9 May 2020 Aus

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Australia

Leading article Australia

Get back to where we once belonged

‘Want to go to the footy? Download the app.’ tweeted Health Minister Greg Hunt on 2 May, speaking to Australians…

Australian Columnists

Latham's Law

Latham’s law

Feral Abacus versus Godzilla Paul Keating christened him the Feral Abacus but now John Hewson has become a Doomsday Clock.…

Simon Collins

Simon Collins

People who shout and gesticulate while walking unaccompanied though city centres used to be called nutters. But we now have…

Guest notes

Euro notes

Europe’s bogus bogeyman The coronavirus pandemic is proving a tough time for the Left. The all-consuming focus on a real…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Selling Beijing the rope

Trade with China masks more sinister intentions

Features Australia, New Zealand

Maori roadblocks

Covid-19 unmasks the true separatist agenda

Features Australia

Churchill in reverse

What we see now on Covid-19 is not what we will see later

Features Australia

China’s pantry

The daigou are stripping our shelves of more than baby formula

Features Australia

WAs three red monkeys

Ordinary people don’t share the billionaires’ fondness for China

Features Australia

Can Morrison emulate our forgotten conservative hero

History tells us there is only one way to avoid a depression

Features Australia

Missing from the National Cabinet – Tony Abbott

Yet another disastrous consequence of Turnbull’s chicanery

Features

Notes on...

Owls

My tawny owl has been self-isolating. I say mine but in truth she chose the nest box in my neighbour’s…

Features

Hiding Biden

The less voters see the Democratic nominee, the more they like him

Features

Force of nature

Spending time outside is vital for mental health

Features

Nothing routine

Autism and lockdown are a challenging mix

Features

Cracking the code

There’s no such thing as ‘the science’ – but facts are emerging from the Covid fog

Features

Wartime romance

Sentimentalising the Blitz is hardly ‘Blitz spirit’

Features

Dying art

There’s nothing morbid about writing obituaries

Features

Viral contagion

The uncontainable spread of fake coronavirus news

The Week

Ancient and modern

The health of the people

The Prime Minister recently quoted Cicero’s famous dictum salus populi suprema lex esto, translating it as ‘Let the health (salus)…

Leading article

On track and trace

The concept of the state tracking our every movement is anathema to this magazine and, we assume, to its liberal…

Letters

Letters

The case for small homes Sir: Your editorial rightly highlights what must be one of the government’s priorities once the…

Barometer

Barometer

Admitting defeat 8 May is celebrated as VE Day, but it is also a date which marks a significant English…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the Week

Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was…

Diary

Diary

Never have I stared at my own face so much. Not because I want to, it’s just always there now,…

Columnists

Columns

For now, age isn’t just a number

When I told my seven-year-old granddaughter, over Zoom, how much I missed being with her, I added: ‘Maybe it won’t…

Columns

It’s not us, China – it’s you

Like nearly everything named a ‘scandal’, ‘affair’ or given the post-fix ‘gate’, almost nobody now remembers the Dalai Lama affair.…

Any other business

Don’t throw money at airlines now: wait for creative destruction ahead

British Airways warns of 12,000 redundancies. Ryanair announces 3,000 job losses as ‘a minimum to survive the next 12 months’;…

Columns

The politics of bookshelves

I pulled a Canadian girl in a nightclub, back when I was in my very early twenties. She seemed very…

The Spectator's Notes

The Spectator’s notes

Mathias Döpfner is that still rare thing — an outspoken German. I have known him slightly for many years and…

Columns

Lullabies and lockdown

I laughed when my Spanish midwife mentioned in passing that in Latin American countries they have a custom for new…

Columns

The coronavirus catalyst

‘The normal grease of politics is not there,’ bemoans one sociable cabinet minister. Certainly, the whispered conversations in corridors that…

Books

More from Books

The great and the not so good

Here are ten political biographies, with a leavening of the classics, for those with time to kill in the present…

More from Books

Drawing a blank

It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…

More from Books

Life on a plate

In the concluding chapter of this book the Daily Telegraph’s restaurant critic and recovering vegan-baiter William Sitwell muses on the…

More from Books

The great juggling act

The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…

More from Books

Least said, soonest mended

Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…

More from Books

A grand tour of the globe

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…

More from Books

Making a killing

What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…

More from Books

Cricket’s Faustian pact

Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…

More from Books

How far should we go?

Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…

More from Books

The poet of self-discovery

To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…

More from Books

Swan song

This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…

Lead book review

Nature fights back

Adrian Woolfson explains the essence of pandemics – and how we can expect many more of them

Arts

Culture Buff

Queens of print

The Spectator has been celebrating its 10,000th UK issue with justifiable pride; it is an astounding achievement. Australia has long…

Exhibitions

Hello, boys

‘Naughty little nudes,’ my history of art teacher used to say of Cranach’s Eves and Venuses. Aren’t they just? Coquettish…

Film

Doggie style

This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive…

Television

Antique dildos

Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if…

Opera

Versailles lockdown

A few years ago I interviewed an eminent baroque conductor. Prickly and professorial, tired after a day of rehearsals, he…

Theatre

Withdrawal symptoms

A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…

The Listener

Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Grade: C+ Where did they all come from, the quirky yet meaningful rock chicks who don’t have a decent song…

More from Arts

Many happy returns

Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying…

Arts feature

Candid camera

William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue

Life

Food

Hope in a takeaway bag

You don’t dine in the age of pandemic: you scuttle about in the wreckage. If you can afford food, and…

Competition

Going solo

In Competition No. 3147 you were invited to submit tips on social isolation in the style of a well-known writer.…

High life

High life

Gstaad Let me begin with a salute to the winner of this year’s Sir Jimmy Goldsmith prize: Professor Neil Ferguson.…

Low life

Low life

They made a better job of sorting out my waterworks

No sacred cows

Emperor Ferguson has no clothes

I originally had Neil Ferguson down as a kind of Henry Kissinger figure. The professor of mathematical biology at Imperial…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary

Q To your correspondent with a guest whose table manners offend (2 May), you suggest screening him off with a…

Crossword solution

Solution to 2453: All Right?

Unclued lights were characters in the musical Oklahoma!, 2/20, 4A, 10, 22, 24, 30, 35/15D. They are AUNT ELLER, WILL…

Real life

Real life

The rain showers had a strange and wondrous effect. All the cyclists, joggers and dog walkers that were coming from…

Wild life

Wild life

I keep thinking what I’ll do when we regain our liberty — and I picture that beer at the end…

Bridge

Bridge

This weekend should have been the Schapiro Spring Foursomes, sponsored by Helen S., widow of the legendary Boris. Held in…

Chess puzzle

Puzzle no. 603

Black to play. Ding–Nakamura, Magnus -Carlsen Invitational, April 2020. The position appears sterile, but Nakamura spotted a clever winning move.…

The Wiki Man

Anyone for a self-isolation Olympics?

In Mr Alton’s absence, I thought readers might want a column about sport. The problem is that I’m largely indifferent…

Crossword

2456: So American

Unclued lights (five of two words) are of a kind, singly, three pairs and a trio. Across 11 Ban on…

Mind your language

Pasture

‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…

Chess

Magnus wins Magnus Carlsen Invitational

‘I haven’t felt this kind of tension in a long while. This was real!’ Those were Magnus Carlsen’s words, after…