The Spectator
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
Feral Abacus versus Godzilla Paul Keating christened him the Feral Abacus but now John Hewson has become a Doomsday Clock.…
Simon Collins
People who shout and gesticulate while walking unaccompanied though city centres used to be called nutters. But we now have…
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
WAs three red monkeys
Ordinary people don’t share the billionaires’ fondness for China
Can Morrison emulate our forgotten conservative hero
History tells us there is only one way to avoid a depression
Missing from the National Cabinet – Tony Abbott
Yet another disastrous consequence of Turnbull’s chicanery
Features
Owls
My tawny owl has been self-isolating. I say mine but in truth she chose the nest box in my neighbour’s…
Cracking the code
There’s no such thing as ‘the science’ – but facts are emerging from the Covid fog
The Week
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)…
On track and trace
The concept of the state tracking our every movement is anathema to this magazine and, we assume, to its liberal…
Portrait of the Week
Home The government put its mind to the puzzle of how to get people back to work. Draft advice was…
Columnists
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…
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.…
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’;…
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
Mathias Döpfner is that still rare thing — an outspoken German. I have known him slightly for many years and…
Lullabies and lockdown
I laughed when my Spanish midwife mentioned in passing that in Latin American countries they have a custom for new…
The coronavirus catalyst
‘The normal grease of politics is not there,’ bemoans one sociable cabinet minister. Certainly, the whispered conversations in corridors that…
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…
Drawing a blank
It needs authorial guts to write a novel in which details are shrouded, meaning is concealed and little is certain.…
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…
The great juggling act
The phrase ‘working mother’ ought to be as redundant sounding as ‘working father’ would be if anyone ever said that:…
Least said, soonest mended
Early on in Tim Finch’s hypnotic novel Peace Talks, the narrator — the diplomat Edvard Behrends, who facilitates international peace…
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…
Making a killing
What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…
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…
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…
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…
Swan song
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…
Nature fights back
Adrian Woolfson explains the essence of pandemics – and how we can expect many more of them
Arts
Queens of print
The Spectator has been celebrating its 10,000th UK issue with justifiable pride; it is an astounding achievement. Australia has long…
Hello, boys
‘Naughty little nudes,’ my history of art teacher used to say of Cranach’s Eves and Venuses. Aren’t they just? Coquettish…
Doggie style
This week I’d like to point you in the direction of the British Film Institute and its free online archive…
Antique dildos
Danny Brocklehurst, the scriptwriter for Sky One’s Brassic, used to work for Shameless in its glory days — although if…
Versailles lockdown
A few years ago I interviewed an eminent baroque conductor. Prickly and professorial, tired after a day of rehearsals, he…
Withdrawal symptoms
A TV play by Tom Stoppard, A Separate Peace, was broadcast live on Zoom last Saturday. I watched as my…
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…
Many happy returns
Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying…
Candid camera
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
Life
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…
Going solo
In Competition No. 3147 you were invited to submit tips on social isolation in the style of a well-known writer.…
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…
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…
Puzzle no. 603
Black to play. Ding–Nakamura, Magnus -Carlsen Invitational, April 2020. The position appears sterile, but Nakamura spotted a clever winning move.…
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…
2456: So American
Unclued lights (five of two words) are of a kind, singly, three pairs and a trio. Across 11 Ban on…
Pasture
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…
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…















































































