Aussie Life
Two friends of mine are being harassed by the government. Both men have criticised the more lurid aspects of LGBTQ+…
ABC – Aiding Beijing’s Communists
Xi Jinping’s propagandists are cheering on our national broadcaster
Diary
It is a particular pleasure to be returning to the columns of The Spectator, more than half a century after…
Could the next Lib Dem leader help Labour?
When Dominic Cummings addressed government advisers recently, he said that he was so out of touch with day-to-day politics that…
The fight to defend academic freedom
About 18 months ago, I attended a debate at Policy Exchange, the think tank founded by Nick Boles, Francis Maude…
A taste of the continent
Is it safe to visit the continent? On the one hand, abroad is likely to be less crowded this August…
Mood shift
Throughout the past few months the government has appeared to face an unenviable choice between saving lives and saving livelihoods.…
Dear Mary
Q. We invited two friends to supper in London. As they came in they said they should order their taxi…
Living with
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
Actress’s Notebook
Rather like unpacking after a holiday, when you take unworn clothes from the case still neatly folded because the occasion…
How will we handle the next contagion?
There’s nothing unprecedented about Covid-19 itself. The equally novel, equally infectious Asian flu of 1957 had commensurate fatalities in Britain:…
Amusement parks
August, as usual, will be the busiest month for Britain’s amusement parks — which is odd when you consider that…
BP, Amazon and airlines light different paths to survival
We should take heart from BP’s £5.1 billion second-quarter loss, accompanied by a halving of its dividend. What’s good about…
The scourge of mankind
In supposedly unprecedented times such as ours, there are compelling reasons to turn to the history of medicine. For hope,…
A tide of distrust
Over the past 50 years, M. John Harrison has produced a remarkably varied body of work: a dozen atmospheric novels…
A radical rite
The history of rubbish can be scholarship, but the history of scholarship is often rubbish. Hindsight diminishes earlier habits of…
Tantrums of a tyrant
It is easy to forget the abnormality of Donald Trump’s presence in the White House. Before his election it would…
The gay carousel
John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…
Small is beautiful
The novelist, memoirist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo writes with tremendous delicacy and nuance about migration, language, alienation, and love. A…
Madcap escapades
The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains,…
Magnificent muddle
In the 62 years since I first heard and saw Don Carlo, in the famous and long-lasting production by Visconti…
Go figure
An oxymoron is a clever gambit in an exhibition title. The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium…
