PREVIOUS ISSUES

CHOOSE A PREVIOUS ISSUE FROM THE LIST    


THIS WEEK'S ISSUE

The Spectator

19 April 2025 Aus

C’mon, Dutt Dutt!

Sign up to The Spectator Australia newsletter

Australia's best political analysis - straight to your inbox

Australia

Leading article Australia

C’mon, Dutt Dutt!

The Coalition can still win. That is the lesson of recent elections in Australia (where the polls have frequently been…

Australian Features

Features Australia

Bowen sinks to new lows

‘No one would have a punt on that’

Features Australia

Poilievre still in the game to win

Trump-deranged commentators don’t understand the Canadian system

Features Australia

ABC of Aboriginal history

Why isn’t the Yoorrook Commission interested in ‘The Whole Truth’?

Features Australia

Meloni’s war on the red robes

Attacking Italy’s activist judges is paying off

Features Australia

A referendum on Albo’s government

Labor’s true believers have become Menzies’ forgotten people

Features Australia

Minerals critical crisis

We have destroyed our own future

Features Australia

Crying out for new leadership

Australia needs Dutton - and NSW needs a fresh new senator

Features

Features

How I found Christianity

I wasn’t brought up in the faith. My maternal grandfather was a Methodist lay-preacher, but when my mother left County…

Notes on...

Admit it: Creme Eggs are vile

Every Easter, the Creme Egg dominates supermarket shelves. It is, Cadbury’s marketing department loves to remind us, ‘the nation’s favourite…

Features

Lamb is for life, not just for Easter

Roast lamb is as expected on the Easter table as turkey is at Christmas. But as a nation, we are…

Features

‘We’re going to a more radical place’: Wes Streeting on his plans for the NHS

A copy of a leading article from The Spectator is stuck to the wall of Wes Streeting’s office in the…

Features

The assisted suicide bill should not survive

Until about six months ago, it would have been hard to find a more inoffensive politician than the Labour backbencher…

Features

Would Trump really bomb Iran?

A satellite picture shows six American B-2 Stealth bombers parked on the runway at Diego Garcia. The planes – each…

Features

Where have all the rabbits gone?

It’s spring and in this corner of rural Sussex, the bluetits are at the window, newborn lambs are bleating in…

Features

‘Jordan Peterson is a sad and angry man’: an interview with Rowan Williams

Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has a new book out, a slim, thoughtful introduction to Christianity. But that’s not…

Features

The world reveres British music

I have just returned from the lovely Italian city of Rimini, where 300 local singers had gathered for a weekend…

The Week

Diary

Spare us from performative piety

Lent did not, I confess, start well. Cheltenham fell in its first week, and the Gold Cup is hardly the…

Portrait of the week

Portrait of the week: British Steel seized, army sent to Birmingham and slim told to stay home in Beijing

Home Parliament was recalled from its Easter recess to sit on a Saturday for the first time since the Falklands…

Ancient and modern

How Roman emperors handled hair loss

Donald Trump’s obsessive ‘awhairness’ makes one wonder: why is it so important to him? The topic was of some interest…

Leading article

The Easter story reminds us of the importance of truth

Live not by lies, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned the West half a century ago, but we have hardly heeded him since.…

Letters

Letters: Donald Trump’s messiah complex

He’s not the messiah Sir: To Freddy Gray’s meticulous dissection of Trumpian chaos theory (‘Shock tactics’, 12 April) I would…

Columnists

Any other business

No one wants American cars

The weekend’s Scunthorpe drama was a distraction from endless chatter about Donald Trump and his tariffs. Perhaps Downing Street’s spinners…

Columns

Sack the judges

The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been…

Columns

Reform vs Labour: who’ll win the battle for the north?

When MPs and peers were recalled to parliament for an emergency debate on renationalising British Steel, one man was the…

Columns

Why were the Abedis here in the first place?

In recent days parliament has been recalled on a Saturday to debate the renationalisation of the British steel industry. Then,…

Columns

The biggest threat to Trump is Trump

Although Republicans and Democrats have few things in common, there’s one American universal: we don’t like when you mess with…

Books

More from Books

Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?

The young are too busy enjoying themselves, the middle-aged are loath to initiate it and the elderly themselves can’t always take part, but it’s a subject sorely in need of public discourse

More from Books

Only Hitler could have brought the disparate Allies together

Their collaboration was riven by secret deals and betrayals, with Roosevelt suspicious of Churchill and Stalin suspicious of everyone, but all purporting to be great friends

More from Books

Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction

A sadistic octogenarian meets her match in a malevolent eight-year-old at a Luxor hotel. Thrillers by Christopher Bollen, Henry Wise, Charlotte Philby and Cristina Rivera Garza reviewed

More from Books

The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed

A magnificent imagining of the life of Lambert Simnel traces his progress from farm boy to coronation in Dublin to turnspit in the Tudor palace kitchens to plans of dark revenge

More from Books

The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A

A meditation on Quartet for the End of Time, Oliver Messiaen’s great prison camp composition, should bring the strange, bird-fixated religious avant-gardist new admirers

More from Books

Why we never tire of tales of pointless polar hardship

Out in the middle of nowhere, our heroes and anti-heroes are stripped down to essentials and the quest for knowledge becomes a quest for self-knowledge and human improvement

Lead book review

The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost

In the manic years 1886-88 when he lived with his brother in Paris, Vincent worked at fever-pitch, exhausting himself and Theo and driving them both towards insanity

More from Books

Christianity in England is dying – and our national identity with it

The self, not society, has begun to matter most to people, with the collective life threatened by ragged bands of individualists lacking a sense of history and burdened by the mere present

More from Books

The pain of being a Bangle – despite sunshine through the rain

The more successful the female rock band became, the unhappier they seemed, with in-fighting and ‘suicidal thoughts’ leading to break up shortly after their greatest hit

More from Books

Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali

Countless people apparently found her fascinating, but apart from being shrewd, scary, intelligent and very beady about money, it’s hard to see why

Arts

Australian Arts

The way the imagination works

Easter was almost on us when the suggestion came. There was talk of a new Narnia film underway and of…

Opera

Devastating: WNO’s Peter Grimes reviewed

Britten’s Peter Grimes turns 80 this June, and it’s still hard to credit it. The whole phenomenon, that is –…

Dance

Exhilarating – but also exhausting: ENB’s The Forsythe Programme reviewed

The first time I saw the work of Trajal Harrell I stomped out in a huff muttering about the waste…

Television

Good lawyers make for bad TV

Given that TV cameras aren’t allowed to film British criminal trials, Channel 4’s new documentary series Barristers: Fighting for Justice…

Exhibitions

Was Sir John Soane one of the first modernists?

Sir John Soane’s story is a good one. Born in 1753 to a bricklayer, at 15 he was apprenticed to…

Pop

Divorce are the best young British band I’ve seen in an age

Can we talk business for a moment? When reviewers like me go to big arenas, we get the best seats…

Exhibitions

Cartier used to be a Timpson’s for the rich

In the fall of, I suppose, 1962, my friend Jimmy Davison and I, window shopping on Fifth Avenue, bumped into…

Theatre

Those behind this fabulous new comedy are destined for big things

Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco is a period piece from 1959. It opens with the invasion of a French village by…

The Listener

An astonishingly good new album from Black Country, New Road

Grade: A Is that a kind of nod to Oasis in the album title? I can’t think of a band…

Arts feature

Why is the British Museum hiding its great Orthodox icons?

The long neglected art of Byzantium and early Christianity is returning to the world’s museums. Last November, the Louvre confirmed…

Life

Aussie Life

Aussie life

The evolutionary psychologist Gad Saad once described woke as a mind virus. For the past decade, Western intellectual and cultural…

Aussie Life

Language

At the end of this year (as every year) the dictionaries of the world will announce their choice for ‘word…

Drink

The Chinese tried to get me drunk

China: what next? Around the time of the millennium, I wrote that during this century, many of the world’s great…

No sacred cows

Can Trump keep me on side?

I’m in danger of falling out of love with Donald Trump. I was ecstatic when he beat Kamala Harris, delighted…

Dear Mary

Dear Mary: Is it acceptable to go to bed before my guests do?

Q. I am a self-employed travel specialist, concentrating on holidays in Asia. Friends (and even friends of friends) plague me…

The Wiki Man

The unsayable case for cars

Rob Henderson is justly famous for coining the phrase ‘luxury beliefs’. These are opinions which are unshakeably held irrespective of…

Real life

Aren’t women wonderful?

The mole specialist was wearing a pink Chanel-looking suit and pink diamanté shoes. By mole specialist, I don’t mean someone…

Wild life

I’m losing the will to hunt

Laikipia, Kenya When I was eight I used to go fishing in the Indian Ocean beyond Vasco da Gama’s pillar…

More from life

The simple elegance of fondant potatoes

In 1999, a relatively unknown American chef wrote an essay in the New Yorker uncovering the secrets of restaurants. ‘Don’t…

City life

Is there sex after 70?

When I turned 70 in September, I had a panic attack. I was certain that my romantic life was over.…