If Victoria avoids becoming a Marxist failed state, it may very well be because of The Spectator Australia’s contributor Ian…

Ducking Peking ASoviet-era joke had someone visiting the part of the commu- nist bureaucracy which issued permission to move your…

Medicos should not be running the country

The billions borrowed will have to be repaid

Falsehood and deception in the Ridd Affair

Why does the Pope not condemn China’s human rights abuses?

Or why race-faking is all the rage

All aboard the Victorian omnibus to the Covid gulag

RINO treachery only ensures a Trump victory

Here at the Spectator Australia Biological Research Unit, together with our research partners at the Wuhan Bat, Rat and Snake…

18C on steroids The idea that a sitting Tasmanian senator can be dragged before the state Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for her…

I was Dennis Nilsen’s boss

London, writes Dr Watson in the first Sherlock Holmes story, is ‘that great cesspool into which all the loungers and…

Is this the man who will replace Merkel?

The looming Tory rebellion against the government’s Covid policy

The myth of the ‘stolen country’

Earlier this month, in his weekly address to the nation, our President, the former DJ and coup leader Andry Rajoelina,…

How Boris can get Britain’s Covid fight back on track

The economic scars of Covid will define the decade

If neighbours break whatever new Covid rules might soon emerge, it has been suggested that the Good Citizen might snitch…

The only female writers of importance I have personally met are Margaret Atwood and Joan Didion, both of whom are…

It’s electrifying! Who invented the circuit-breaker? Thomas Edison patented it in 1879, realising what damage could be caused to electrical…

Disastrous decisions Sir: In his otherwise excellent analysis of Boris Johnson’s premiership (‘The missing leader’, 19 September), Fraser Nelson suggests…

Hard though it is to remember now, 2020 began with a very different dark cloud on the horizon. For a…

Home Pubs and restaurants would have to close at ten o’clock, under new coronavirus restrictions announced by Boris Johnson, the…

Within hours of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, Democrats and Republicans began fighting over how to fill her…

I’ve never been a great fan of public demonstrations. When I was at university, one of the great causes du…

Good riddance to the passenger rail franchise system which has finally been killed off by Covid, though a majority of…

In the light of recent articles in The Spectator, I think it is vital I should point out here and…

The National Trust has brought out its ‘Interim Report’, with the clumsy title ‘Addressing our histories of colonialism and historic…

Tom Stoppard is a non-stop genius of jokes – but many of them make his latest biographer uneasy, says Craig Raine

Christopher Hitchens once said that women just aren’t as funny as men and Caitlin Moran believed him. But that was…

In the Pacific Northwest, Native Americans paint images of salmon on to stones. They say that if you rub those…

Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens,…

You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration…

Ten years ago, reviewing Alastair Campbell’s diaries for The Spectator, I concluded as follows: Who will be the chroniclers of…

When reviewers say that some new book reminds them of some famous old book, it often ends up as a…

The greatest pain of lockdown has been, for me, the absence of am-dram. In one half of my life I’m…

It’s odd when you think of the way television has usurped almost everything else in the time of the virus.…

Collectors of TV titles that sound as if they were thought of by Alan Partridge will presumably have spotted Danny…

Grade: B– Time has been kind to Cat Stevens’s reputation — his estrangement from the music business and rad BAME…

The Old Vic refuses to reopen. Director Matthew Warchus says the social distancing rules make it impossible for him to…

I think I am supposed to say that Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third in a franchise about…

The email from English National Opera was blunt: ‘Your arrival time is 18.25. If you arrive outside your allocated time…

The mediumistic art of various cranks, crackpots and old dowagers is finally being taken seriously – and about time too, says Laura Gascoigne

In Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, the protagonist, at the Venice Biennale, muses on installations. ‘Ideally, the perfect art installation…

What has happened to Rada? The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art is the latest arts establishment to have gone mad.…

What has happened to the West, ignoring the lessons of history? Sweden, for example, long regarded as one of the…

Bexhill-on-Sea My Aunt Beryl taught me to love books and paintings. When I’m at a loose end in London, lonely,…

The Volkswagen Passat was parked next to my field gate, sticking out into the lane, blocking larger vehicles from getting…

Scotching my bright idea of a stiff gin for Dutch courage in the bar across the road, Catriona bounded straight…

Kristie Higgs, a 44-year-old school assistant, didn’t realise that criticising the sex education curriculum at her son’s school on Facebook…

When I first learnt bridge, my teacher (not known as bossy boots for nothing) would thump the table when dummy…

Gstaad I’ve been wrestling all week with indecision, the kind that tests one’s soul, and the uncertainty is killing me.…

White to play. Areshchenko–Koch, Bundesliga 2020. White has won rook for bishop, but the queen is offside and his Rf2…

Send in haste, repent at leisure. It is a cruel certainty that you will sooner or later text your intimate…

In Competition No. 3167 you were invited to submit a rhymed poem that is leadenly prosaic in tone and content.…

The ten unclued lights (one of two words and hyphened) consist of two themes which can be resolved into five…

The unclued lights, along with Peter MAY in the title, are England cricket captains. First prize Harry Hyman, Streatley, West…

José Mourinho, it was surprising to read, recently said how relieved he was that the Amazon Prime cameras were out…

London is gasping — so where to go but Soho, which is so good at despair? It is often necrotic…

Q. My husband and I have spent many happy weekends in the seaside cottage of long-standing friends. Knowing how much…

‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the…