As with the Chinese New Year, Ramadan, and other festive occasions on our multicultural calendar, the ten-day period from Rosh…

Shadows on the cave wall Kiwis, punching above their weight on the world stage as per, have taken democracy to…

Spectator Australia contributor Anne Gallagher is currently overseas and received this letter from her 17-year old daughter. It is reproduced…

A decade ago Al Gore released his documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Second only to 9/11 it was the decade’s most…

The same sex marriage push didn’t just appear overnight. It’s the result of carefully crafted campaigns by US homosexuals with…

Nearly ten months on, the University of Sydney appears to be coming to grips with the fact that Donald Trump…

In his capacity as an individual, Malcolm Turnbull has just as much right to an opinion on same-sex marriage as…

One popular metaphor used by No campaigners is that of the Trojan horse. Same-sex marriage will, the metaphor suggests, introduce…

Created by a combination of federal political incompetence and ideology-based state stupidity, it is sovereign risk, above all else, that…

As every Speccie reader certainly will be aware and no doubt heartily applaud, the game of rugby league was born…

Black lives matter Black tennis player Sloane Stephens won the recent US Open. She beat Venus Williams in the semi-final.…

Sir Andrew Davis became Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and, happily, will continue until the end…

This retiring is a hectic business. When I said in June that it was going to be my last year…

How many people need to gather together before it becomes more likely than not that at least two of them…

Have you heard the one about the new Labour MP who refuses to be friends with Tories? When Laura Pidcock…

The time for choosing is fast approaching for Theresa May. Soon she must make a decision that will define her…

The issue of sovereignty has mysteriously disappeared from the debate over Brexit. Some business-focused commentators even like to assert that…

Beware of jumping to conclusions about Brexit-induced violence

Georgia’s former president may be a reckless narcissist, but he could change everything

Few world leaders have fallen from grace as quickly as Aung San Suu Kyi. The Nobel prize-winner, who also holds…

Christians betrayed Sir: Michael Karam’s article (Ya Allah!, 16 September) is timely. Many Westerners seem to be unaware that there…

Next month, the Today programme marks its 60th anniversary, so I have been mugging up on the archives. If there…

Home Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, issued a manifesto for a ‘glorious future’ for Britain outside the European Union as…

Growing up in Raleigh, North Carolina, I took the monuments around the state capitol for granted. The first Confederate soldier…

Not long after the Parsons Green Tube bombing, another of those viral, defiant-in-the-face-of-terror cartoons started doing the rounds. It was…

It is more than three years since Bank of England governor Mark Carney was accused by Labour MP and Treasury…

Sir David Norgrove, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), is an honourable man. When he publicly rebuked Boris…

Here’s the problem. An Asian bloke gets on to the Tube holding a bulging Lidl bag with wires sticking out…

One of the great achievements of science is that so many of its branches, from astronomy to zoology, have been…

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate…

When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal.…

The Harder They Come, Jamaica’s first (and still finest) home-grown film, was released in 1972 with the local singer Jimmy…

In 1933 my aunt Lenina Bibikova was eight years old. She lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. Every morning a polished black…

‘Publitical’ is a neologism worth avoiding. Bill Goldstein uses it to describe T.S. Eliot’s activities when launching and promoting his…

Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old…

  David Cannadine was a schoolboy in 1950s Birmingham, which was still recognisable as the city that Joseph Chamberlain had…

Here’s an intriguing thought experiment: could Damien Hirst disappear? By that I mean not the 52-year-old artist himself — that…

You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the…

On Sunday night, Holliday Grainger was on two terrestrial channels at the same time playing a possibly smitten sidekick of…

Grade: B+ Number one. Everywhere, just about. You have to say that the man has a certain sureness of touch.…

For many years The Spectator employed a television reviewer who did not own a colour television. Now they have decided…

Borg vs McEnroe is a dramatised account of one of the greatest tennis rivalries of all time — between Bjorn…

At the heart of Basic Instincts, the new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, is an extraordinarily powerful painting…

‘You can’t lie… on radio,’ says Liza Tarbuck. The Radio 2 DJ was being interviewed for the network’s birthday portrait,…

Much fuss has been made of the title given to Sir Simon Rattle on arrival at the London Symphony Orchestra.…

Oslo opened in the spring of 2016 at a modest venue in New York. It moved to Broadway and this…

It has been a reasonably good week for peripatetic opera-loving female-underwear fetishists. In La bohème at Covent Garden Musetta slipped…

My husband complains that the disposition of teenagers in London is one of mocking hostility. I seem to suffer less…

BT have just put the phone down on me for asking them to stop sending me junk mail, which is…

One of the mysteries of our age is why socialism continues to appeal to so many people. Whether in the…

You can try to change people’s minds, but this is difficult. You can bribe people to change their behaviour, but…

In Competition No. 3016 you were invited to submit an extract from the diary of the spouse of a high-profile…

Q. Last year my husband and I stayed with a much-loved, but slightly airy-fairy friend in her house in Tuscany.…

I was reminded of Wild West films from boyhood. Then, the beleaguered garrison scanned the horizon; would the US cavalry…

As everyone who stands up when a lady enters the room knows, the once sacrosanct rules of civility throughout the…

I got off the plane at Changi still pleasantly sedated by Xanax, passed through the ‘nothing to declare’ channel, and…

I’m writing this from Stuart Wheeler’s beautiful villa in Tangier, in the hills just above the bay, where for a…

Last week I focused on the games and somewhat tragic career of the ingenious David Bronstein. Before his time the…

White to play. This position is from Jobava-Nepomniachtchi, FIDE World Cup, Tbilisi 2017. Can you spot White’s winning coup? Answers…

6A and 42 (whose unchecked letters give IDEA) combine to suggest the title of a novel. Remaining unclued lights give…

The theme was PIGS.  First prize J. E. Green, St Albans, HertfordshireRunners-up Michael Moran, Penrith, Cumbria; John M. Brown, Rolleston…