Smudged with human stories
Nothing captures medieval life more vividly than a manuscript that has passed through many hands, says Jonathan Sumption
Labour has gone back to 1983
One day quite soon someone at a petrol pump is going to get a tyre iron wrapped around their head.…
The tactics of victimhood
Late last week the Labour deputy leader was the subject of a glowing profile in the Times. The piece described…
Unfamiliarity breeds contempt
For a brief moment three summers ago it seemed that the clear Idaho air wafting through the Sun Valley Literary…
The Spectator’s Notes
On the one occasion when I spent any time with Angela Rayner, she was funny, direct and friendly. We were…
A snapper-up of unconsidered trifles
These aren’t diaries in the sense that Chips Channon kept diaries, or Samuel Pepys. They aren’t diaries at all, beyond…
Don’t mix up murder and hate crime
I’m not sure very many of our politicians, the London Mayor or even the Met can really be said to…
Unkindly light
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle sequence is one of this century’s great projects: an intimate epic in which the overriding…
In two minds
Readers of Case Study unfamiliar with its author’s previous work might believe they have stumbled on a great psychotherapy scandal.…
Lights, camera, traction
There’s a great revival under way in the British TV and film industry, but it’s not the BBC that’s behind…
An inner pilgrimage
When E. Nesbit published Wet Magic in 1913 (a charming novel in which the children encounter a mermaid), she took…
Diary
I am just back from my final salmon fishing trip of the year. I have never had a worse season…
A slippery slope
Have you heard of champing? Neither had I. Turns out it’s camping in a field beside a deserted church. When…
Six of the worst Scottish minister Humza Yousaf scandals
It can be a difficult task picking out the most incompetent minister in the Scottish government. There’s Sturgeon’s deputy John…
Keir Starmer’s Bond blunder
Oh dear. Less than 24 hours after David Lammy (of all people) claimed Labour should not get involved in identity politics,…
Harriet Harman calls for Cressida Dick to resign
Labour’s Harriet Harman has called for Cressida Dick to resign as chief of the Metropolitan Police after Wayne Couzens was…
A government of drunken sailors
It seems strange, but just two decades ago the United States government had a balanced budget. Bill Clinton had run…
In defense of brilliant idiot athletes
I don’t care what LeBron James thinks or says. That’s why, unlike the many conservatives who have turned their backs…
Gladys goes. Will the NSW government?
How Gladys Berejiklian has fallen. It’s been just five months from her The woman who saved Australia front page of the…
Blame Biden for the sinking infrastructure bill
President Joe Biden, facing a crisis on the southern border, a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and a breakdown of relations…
Liberty demands the state respect religion
While the commonwealth government is yet to table the revised version of its Freedom of Religion Bill there’s no doubt…
Meet Japan’s latest unloved leader
Japan will soon have yet another new prime minster: Fumio Kishida. He will be the country’s third leader in as…
