The Spectator
12 January 2019 Aus
Project Fact: how scared should we really be of a no deal?
Australia
Free speech beached
Let’s start by stating the bleeding obvious. The organisers of any ‘right-wing’ rally that allow or fail to prevent a…
Identity notes
Colourful opinions In the last edition of the Saturday Paper for 2018 there is an article by a self-styled ‘Person…
Brexit notes
Parris and the mob No doubt many readers viewed with incredulity Speccie columnist Matthew Parris’s nostalgia for the democratic process…
Conservative notes
Lefty Tory Brits Arriving in London for a posting at Australia House during the dying days of the Blair government,…
Australian Features
Shame, shame, shame on New Zealand
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel once famously wrote ‘what hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor, but…
One-way hate speech
Britain is allowing political correctness, or fear of political incorrectness, increasingly to destroy its civil liberties and silence freedom of…
Foreign aid, feminist propaganda
‘Where are the women business leaders in Vietnam?’. It sounds like a question at a pub trivia night. The answer…
Australian Books
Of the people
This must be the first occasion when a book on politics, written in Australia, has been listed among the year’s…
Australian Columnists
Wozzeck
The story is bleak, very bleak; the music bleak and very loud, yet Wozzeck is regarded as an outstanding 20th…
Simon Collins
If you still haven’t got around to making a New Year’s resolution, why not make one you won’t be able…
Brown study
Here at the United Nations Cultural Reform Centre we are working on a major project that will help deliver us…
Australian notes
How on earth can we ensure that 2019 is a more positive and constructive year than the last one? Australia…
Features
Project Fact: how scared should we really be of a no deal?
Food shortages, diabetics going without insulin, outbreaks of salmonella and swine flu: a no-deal Brexit has become a dystopia of…
How Eddie Davenport rebranded middle-class swingers parties as ‘posh’ orgies
The English love a story of posh people behaving badly, especially one that involves sex, drugs or drink — preferably…
Who poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
At the height of the Cold War, as the West faced off against Red China and the Soviet Union, people…
The middle-class cats that are ditching meat
As I write, my cats and a visitor from the next street are hammering into their food, at nearly £5…
How Britain became the world’s largest expert in medical marijuana
If you were looking for an international drugs empire, Downham Market would not be the first place you’d think of.…
The strange love-in between Michel Houellebecq and Emmanuel Macron
France’s literary event of the year took place this week with the publication of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Serotonin. Named…
There were far fewer terror attacks last year. Here’s why
They don’t like to use the ‘Q’ word in counter-terrorism. It’s a bit like blurting out the name of the…
The homesick Brit’s guide to Paris
‘Yes, it’s here!’ says the sign above the English épicerie in Paris. ‘Yes, at last,’ thinks the starved expat wandering…
The Week
Political discourse in the UK is broken – here’s how we fix it
For several weeks now, a group of anti-Brexit protesters have found a way of regularly appearing on television news. They…
Portrait of the week: a government defeat, the harassment of Anna Soubry and Trump’s wall crisis
Home The government drifted towards a vote by the Commons, which it had cancelled in December, on its withdrawal agreement…
If anyone knows May’s secret plan, it’s Philip
As a hack who lived and breathed the financial crisis, you might think that at the start of 2008 and…
Those tempted to turn over a new leaf this year should remember Aesop’s fables
At this time of year the media urge us all to turn over a new leaf and believe that we…
Letters: Europe is changing – so do we really need to leave?
The changing EU Sir: If, as Frederik Erixon writes, ‘there is a strange pre-revolutionary atmosphere in Brussels’ and ‘power will be…
Columnists
Behind the story of Anna Soubry being called a Nazi lies a classic Brexit sequence of events
Behind the incident of Anna Soubry being called a Nazi by a small group of Leave yobs beside College Green…
Does May even have a Plan B?
Cabinets these days are fractious affairs. Ministers take increasingly unsubtle digs at each other as they rehearse the same old…
Can the National Trust please forget about ‘heteronormative privilege’ and just look after houses?
There is a satirical website called ‘Guardian headline generator’ which purports to offer a service to aspirant journalists who wish…
How to become a country squire – like me
In the days when I was less happy in my skin than I am now, I used to feel stabs…
Why Macron is happy to leave Renault’s chief shivering in his Tokyo cell
In France after New Year, the only gilets jaunes I spotted were a rather dejected bunch near an autoroute exit.…
Books
Hungary is being led once again down a dangerous nationalistic path
Norman Stone has already written, with a brilliant blend of humour, understanding and scepticism, histories of the Eastern Front, Turkey,…
Should William Penn be shaking in his grave?
The ultimate driving force of William Penn’s adult life is inaccessible, as the Quaker phrase ‘Inner Light’ suggests. While a…
Partying with John and Yoko: The Dakota Winters, by Tom Barbash, reviewed
Tom Barbash’s dark and humorous second novel takes a risk by combining invented and real characters. I feared nagging doubts…
Nazi caricatures: The Order of the Day, by Éric Vuillard, reviewed
There was a time when you read French literary novels in order to cultivate a certain kind of sophisticated suspicion.…
It’s a lifetime of hard work being an artist
Once, when a number of Royal Academicians were invited to Buckingham Palace, the celebrated abstract painter John Hoyland (1934–2011) found…
Love in a time of people-trafficking: Among the Lost, by Emiliano Monge, reviewed
From the very first pages of Among the Lost, we’re engaged, and compromised. Estela and Epitafio are our main anchors,…
Make it a new year’s resolution to be less active
As a boy Josh Cohen was passive, dopey and given to daydreaming. Now a practising psychoanalyst and a professor of…
Small but deadly: postcards that fuelled the Russian Revolution
In this handsomely illustrated book Tobie Mathew makes a case for the lowly postcard’s role in the politicisation of pre-revolutionary…
Catchwords for today — what’s in, what’s out
The mid-term elections in the US, when Democrats took over Congress, were hailed as a victory for ‘progressives’, while David…
What did the Romans ever do for London?
When Bishop Guy of Amiens looked across the Channel in the 11th century he saw ‘teeming London [which] shines bright.…
An Igbo Paradise Lost: An Orchestra of Minorities, by Chigozie Obioma, reviewed
Nurture hatred in your heart and you will keep ‘an unfed tiger in a house full of children’. A man…
Life and death in 1970s Belfast: For the Good Times, by David Keenan, reviewed
David Keenan’s debut novel, This is Memorial Device, about a small town in Lanarkshire and its post-punk scene, showed that…
France gets a taste for Bacon
The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…
In Epping Forest’s dark undergrowth
In this current era of identity politics and a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality amongst a younger generation,…
Arts
The balletic, bum-baring rituals of sumo
An early morning in late November in the peaceful glades that surround an ancient temple complex. A Shinto priest in…
The best tribute possible to the greatest comics ever: Stan & Ollie reviewed
You mess with Laurel and Hardy at your peril. Their fan base is essentially the entire world. Samuel Beckett adored…
Neil MacGregor’s intense, impassioned new radio programme is shamelessly anti-Brexit
I suspect that whether or not you admire Neil MacGregor’s latest series for Radio 4, As Others See Us (produced…
According to BBC4, what was one of the ‘most important inventions in modern music’?
Here’s a tricky quiz question for you. What word completes this sentence from a BBC4 documentary on Friday: ‘The world…
A masterpiece of pro-Trump propaganda: Sweat at the Donmar Warehouse reviewed
Sweat, set in the Pennsylvanian rust belt, looks at a blue-collar community threatened by a factory closure. The script uses…
It’s hard to think of finer images of children than Gainsborough’s
When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it…
Life
Why 1919 wasn’t the year it’s cracked up to be
Gstaad The funny thing is that I was at school with a man called Ted Widmer, and I recently read…
I ended New Year’s Eve more sober than I started it
We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would…
The Kafkaesque nightmare of cancelling my BT broadband
Oh, I suppose I might as well give it a whirl, I thought, as the recorded voice began its dirge:…
Why former prisoners make the best lawyers
Kampala I am terrified of being with former death-row prisoner Susan Kigula. This is because she qualified for her…
Three titans
The Dutch grandmaster Genna Sosonko specialises in biographies of the greats of the Soviet era. His earlier forays covered the…
no. 536
Black to play. This position is from Botvinnik-Smyslov, World Championship, Moscow (Game 18) 1958. How could Smyslov have forced instant…
The ex factor
In Competition No. 3080 you were invited to supply an elegy on a piece of obsolete technology. Thanks to Paul…
2390: Tea shop
Unclued lights, all confirmed in Chambers or Collins, are three sets of four words of a kind, each set relating…
to 2388: Sea rocket
The quotation was ‘IN MY BEGINNING IS MY END’ (12/15) from East Coker (an anagram of the title), second poem…
The unending war against masculinity and men
For the first time in its history, the American Psychological Association (APA) has issued guidelines for mental health professionals working…
If ever a man deserved his gong, it’s Sir Alastair Cook
Here’s a date for the diary: if you’re in south London on 11 April, head for the Oval. It’s going…
Dear Mary: How do I get an answer from my elusive publisher?
Q. What is the current etiquette regarding chasing an opinion from a publisher to whom, by agreement and via a…
This is a restaurant for affluent halfwits: Bob Bob Ricard reviewed
In January, you could go to Bob Bob Ricard in Soho. I do not know why it is called Bob…
Illeism: the weird habit of talking about oneself in the third person
Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as…
Cartoons
