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The Spectator

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Australia

Leading article Australia

We don’t need to talk about Kevin

‘The United States,’ opined former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd back in early 2021, ‘has been run by a village…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Budget season ends

Which state takes the wooden spoon?

Features Australia

Will Trump sink Aukus?

Our Prime Minister continues to shamefully neglect our defence

Features Australia

Dead babies

Abortion laws are out of control

Features Australia

The rape gangs scandal

Culture and class betrayed those poor white girls

Features Australia

F-bombs and N-bombs

Dissecting the Trump doctrine

Features Australia

Cold comfort at Glastonbury

Something nasty in Woodsie’s Shed

Features Australia

Could Wite be the new Blak?

Perhaps non-Aboriginal Australians need their own version of Naidoc week

Features Australia

America’s useless European allies

But they have a fan in our Prime Minister

Features Australia

Trump prevails over mullahs, judges & fake news

Terrified of the White House, Albo retreats to Beijing

Features

Features

Admit it: most wedding speeches are awful

Perhaps the most traumatic part of attending an American wedding – much worse than the bridesmaids coming in the wrong…

Features

Is Britain ready for France’s most controversial novel?

This Saturday is the centenary of the birth of one of France’s most controversial writers. Jean Raspail, who died in…

Features

The Alawite women taken as sex slaves in Syria

Syria’s Alawite communities are in the grip of a fear that their women and girls could be kidnapped and held…

Notes on...

How postcards made Britain

Worse for drink, and lonely in his Hollywood apartment, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to write a postcard. He began,…

Features

Can Keir Starmer fend off Labour’s big beasts?

It was the chronicle of a death foretold. Last year Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, drafted a memo…

Features

Labour should look to Andy Burnham for inspiration

For Keir Starmer, it seems everything is going south. His MPs are openly rebelling, his advisers are mutinous and it…

Features

My memories of the royal train

It is the most civilised way to travel anywhere in the kingdom. Which is why I am so distraught that…

Features

Public libraries deserve to shut – they’ve forgotten why they exist

The usual piece about public libraries runs like this. Public libraries are for ‘more than just books’. They are in…

Features

Meet Zohran Mamdani, the man who will ruin New York

Manhattan The Friday before New York’s Democratic mayoral primary election, the 33-year-old candidate Zohran Mamdani walked the entire length of…

The Week

Diary

A book signing – or a mental breakdown?

The late John Updike once wrote an amusing article about signing books. This wasn’t at some literary event with a…

Leading article

For the NHS, it’s Wes or bust

Labour swept to power on a pledge to ‘save the NHS’. As shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting said he would…

Letters

Letters: What public inquiries get wrong

Movers and shakers Sir: As a parish priest of 35 years, I read Francis Pike’s account of his supernatural experiences…

Ancient and modern

A Spartan’s guide to body shaming

Now that new drugs have allowed the government’s Fat Controller to celebrate a nation of skinnies – let us hope…

Columnists

Any other business

What hope is there for today’s unlucky graduates?

I’m fresh out of advice for those now leaving university and wondering how on earth they’re going to make a…

Columns

How Labour governments always end

Couldn’t we just skip to the end? I’m old enough to have seen this so often: must I sit through…

Columns

My idea for a new grooming gang inquiry

It’s disorienting but satisfying that Labour now accepts that Asian grooming gangs exist. Some of my left-identified friends are even…

The Spectator's Notes

Tim Davie shouldn’t quit over Glastonbury

There probably never has been a time when a governing party much liked its MPs. If you are on a…

Columns

Farage is the pacesetter of British politics

For the past year, Nigel Farage has served as the great pacesetter of British politics. Reform UK has shot to…

Columns

And now let’s bomb Glastonbury

A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from…

Columns

Who really built this country?

Anyone who has visited Canada or Australia in recent years might have noticed an interesting new tradition. This is the…

Books

More from Books

Who’s deceiving whom?: The Art of the Lie, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson, reviewed

A struggling widow hooks up with a serial confidence trickster in a novel as witty and ruthlessness as its Georgian setting

More from Books

Masculinity in crisis – portrayed by Michael Douglas

As the Manhattan attorney in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, Douglas epitomises the alarm many men felt for women’s new-found openness about sexuality

More from Books

Could the giant panda be real?

Even in the past century the animal was considered so exotic that many doubted its very existence

More from Books

Highs and lows: The Boys, by Leo Robson, reviewed

Mourning the loss of their parents, two brothers succumb to listlessness and lethargy in a sweltering London gripped by Olympic fever

More from Books

Tim Franks goes in search of what it means to be Jewish

In a thought-provoking family history, the BBC journalist addresses questions of identity – and to what extent we are products of our forebears

More from Books

Putin’s stranglehold on the Russian press

Two former Izvestiya journalists describe how all but the bravest in the media have crumpled under pressure to toe the Putinist line

More from Books

The key to Giorgia Meloni’s resounding success

The once sullen, bullied girl, abandoned by her father as a baby, found iron in her soul and refused to become a victim

Lead book review

The race against Hitler to build the first nuclear bomb

The bomb was necessary to the Allies, but still horrified those responsible for its development – many of them refugees from Nazism

Arts

Australian Arts

Bush noir

Barry Jones likes to allude to the fact that John Adams declared that he had to study agriculture and warfare…

Dance

Depressingly corny: Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, reviewed

It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a…

Exhibitions

The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s

Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and…

Pop

No amount of discourse will make a good pop song into a great one

There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be…

Pop

The political climate at Glastonbury was not especially febrile

Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid…

Opera

Brave and beautiful: Longborough’s Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed

King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score…

Television

The Simpsons may be genius – but it’s also evil

Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care? I’ve written loads of pieces over the years about the genius of…

Theatre

Scooby-Doo has better plots: Almeida’s A Moon for the Misbegotten reviewed

A Moon for the Misbegotten is a dream-like tragedy by Eugene O’Neill set on a barren farm in Connecticut. Phil…

Arts feature

Landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith on mistakes, sand and weeds

If you’re looking for an early example of Tom Stuart-Smith’s work, you’d have to go to a car park to…

Cinema

Jurassic Park Rebirth is the dumbest yet

Midway through Jurassic World Rebirth the scientist character played by Jonathan Bailey, whom we can all immediately spot as a…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

Tony Abbott has written Australia, a personal take on our history, focused on the positives. But this is a mug’s…

Aussie Life

Language

A short time ago I was chatting with the former deputy prime minister of Australia John Anderson about the sort…

Food

‘This is as good as food gets in London’ – Town, in Drury Lane, reviewed

Town – well-named, it has vitality – is on the ragged part of Drury Lane WC2 near the Majestic Wine…

Competition

Spectator Competition: Problematic

For Competition 3406 you were invited to cast a well-known fictional or non-fictional character, living or dead, in the role…

Mind your language

The politics of pips

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would…

No sacred cows

Ofcom still isn’t sure what a woman is

Earlier this week, GB News again found itself at odds with Ofcom. The channel had written to the broadcast regulator…

Sport

State-school cricket at Lord’s? Bring it on

A state-school cricket competition announced last week with a final at Lord’s is such a good idea you wonder why…

The turf

‘Boldness was his friend in betting and in life’: A tribute to the great Barry Hills

I have always enjoyed Royal Windsor Racecourse, as it styles itself. It may not have quite so many dignitaries popping…

No life

Will the Irish ever forgive the English?

Leaving home is the best way to find out who you are. In my case, it’s a muddle. Welsh dad.…

Real life

I’ve become a slave to my Airbnb star rating

‘Right, we’re going to book into Pauline’s B&B and give her a four-star rating and that will drop her down…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: How can I get enough champagne at a party?

Q. I had the same Spanish housekeeper for 25 years and was devoted to her, and she to me. She…