The Spectator

The clock is now ticking on Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership. He currently faces active resistance from more than a score of…

When one first lands in Warsaw, it’s easy to dismiss the prevailing Soviet realist architecture. The endless blocks of flats…

Vacancy for a leader, not a comedian Malcolm Turnbull is the latest Australian politician to risk relations with our most…

14 and counting As the Parliament resumed last Monday for its final sitting prior to the winter recess, Newspoll again…

Each new Islamic terrorist atrocity is denounced by western leaders such as our Prime Minister as a ‘twisted’ or ‘perverted’…

Almost every other Aboriginal woman I know has been subject to family violence. It is in fact rare for an…

While the Liberal party tears itself apart over whether a Clean Energy Target as proposed by the Finkel report delivered…

On 11 May 2017, under the auspices of Dialogue4Peace, I, together with Egyptian Copt, Nadia Ghali, were the main speakers…

The new aristocrats Listen these days to some of the world’s elite politicians, commentators and officials pontificate and you’d think…

I should stop saying I am surprised by this or that decision of the Turnbull government. But last week’s one…

Theresa May, arsonist Are you aware that Theresa May, UK Prime Minister, set fire to a residential tower in Kensington,…

Last week came the welcome announcement of the State Government’s funding of the major extension, indeed doubling, of the exhibition…

When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I…

Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk…

If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it…

The last housing scandal in Notting Hill brought down a Conservative government and transformed the social policy of Britain. Peter…

The Tory party is having the wrong conversation. Whenever two or three Conservative MPs are gathered together, they discuss who…

Which Hogwarts house would you be in? There are four options, and everybody fits into one. The brave and chivalrous…

Dear John, I really hope you won’t be offended by this letter from your uncle. I have nothing but respect…

Bicycling up Regent Street in the intense June heat last week, I was cut up by a black cab driver.…

BBC Radio 4  – The Reith lectures A few years back, before I began writing novels about the Tudors, my…

I gave up coffee a couple of weeks ago. I won’t pretend it was easy. The physical withdrawal began with…

It’s time for the Conservatives to rediscover conservatism

Five years after I swore I’d finished with him, it’s odd to be back on the road with Alex Rider.…

The unexpected outcome of the general election has led some to hope that a weakened government will be forced to…

Denialist Sir: David Williamson (‘Oceans apart’, 17 June) shows that the planet is dynamic and many natural processes are not…

Home The burnt-out skeleton of Grenfell Tower, the 24-storey block of 127 flats at Latimer Road, west London, became a…

Regular readers know I have an umbilical connection to Barclays, because my father spent his working life there, I was…

‘If he can’t be in politics,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted last week after Tim Farron resigned the leadership of…

London, city of the damned. City of incendiary tower blocks, jihadi mentals trying to slit your throat, yokels from Somerset…

How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s…

One of the most pitiful sights in conflict areas is the local prosthetics store, with its rows of artificial limbs,…

Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed…

Giles Udy did not start out with the intention of writing this book. He was in Russia about 15 years…

There must be any number of self-respecting gemmologists out there on first-name terms with other diamonds, but for most of…

Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as…

‘There is room for a very interesting work,’ Gibbon observed in a footnote, ‘which should lay open the connection between…

Rumour will run wild about a society of warrior women, somehow free from the world of men. We all feel…

Adam Thorpe’s latest novel, Missing Fay, examines the lives of a disparate group of people in Lincolnshire, all touched in…

‘I do not like the idea of the biographical book,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald told his editor Max Perkins in 1936.…

As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the…

This is the story of a 16th-century Portuguese knight and mariner who survived alone on a lump of volcanic rock…

Described by the publisher as a ‘moving and personal account of what it is to be a police officer today’,…

In many ways this is a very old-fashioned novel. Jerome is 53, and a lacklustre professor at Columbia; his wife,…

How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…

Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue…

Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer…

‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…

‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…

Much though I loved it at the time, not a great deal of lasting worth came out of that fervid…

In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable…

Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on…

Back on the political beat with CNN for the general election, I was reminded how politics is now dominated by…

The past two weeks have seen hundreds of passionate bridge players head for Montecatini in Italy for the 8th European…

Tigran Petrosian is the great chess hero of Armenia. World champion from 1963-1969, his best games exhibit a profundity which…

White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-Giri, Stavanger 2017. How can White exploit the terrible position of…

In Competition No. 3003 you were invited to supply clerihews about contemporary politicians. In an enormous and excellent entry, popular…

Seven unclued entries are all examples of the other. Elsewhere, ignore an accent.   Across 11    Ginger wine and rose…

The thematic BEATLES ALBUM (38 32) is SERGEANT PEPPER (1A 6A). 1A defines 17, and can be divided into words…

Q. I import a range of very high-quality food products from Europe into the UK. They are regarded as the…

Hip Chips is a specialist crisp restaurant in Old Compton Street, Soho; no, it is stupider than that. It is…

A famous epigrammatic nugget of wisdom appears in The Leopard, Lampedusa’s great novel about a noble Sicilian family’s fortunes: ‘If…

‘Yours?’ I said to the woman watching the mechanic poring over the latest-shape Renault Mégane for faults. (I was waiting…

Laura Kuenssberg was right. Even my husband agreed, and he often throws soiled beermats from an unknown source (which he…

All had gone suspiciously quiet down our little track on the village green, and we had begun to think we…

The Pakistan supporter was festooned in cream and green, and carried a chalkboard round his neck with the legend: ‘My…

Earlier this week the Guardian launched ‘Brexit Shorts’, a series of monologues written by Britain’s ‘leading playwrights’ about the aftermath…