Are things really getting better? The numbers tell us so
Many people are gloomy about 2018. But some things are improving every year… Natural disasters These killed 9,066 people in…
If Trump seems bad, remember Caligula
Whatever one makes of the accuracy of the journalist Michael Wolff’s depiction of President Trump, it cannot all be the…
Remembering Gavin Stamp, former architecture writer of The Spectator
Gavin Stamp, who died just before the year’s end, will be mourned by many Spectator readers. For years, particularly in…
The Cabinet reshuffle highlighted Theresa May’s three great weaknesses
‘They are not as strong as they thought they were,’ one Whitehall source remarked to me on Monday night as…
Your Twitter history will always haunt you – if you’re on the right
I once asked Michael Gove, when he had just been appointed Education Secretary, if he would mind awfully appointing me…
Victims of crime should not decide justice
Hard cases make bad law. The release on parole of the ‘black cab rapist’, John Worboys, is a hard case.…
For some girls, therapy does more harm than good
In the churchyard by the church near my grandmother’s house, there’s a tombstone with an inscription that’s haunted me since…
Michael Wolff said the US needed a market-charming president: now it has one
I once commissioned Michael Wolff —currently the world’s most talked-about journalist as the author of the White House exposé Fire…
Welcome to the age of the digital inquisition
A friend of mine at university had a rule: he didn’t want anything to appear online that might ruin a…
Building artificial beauty spots to protect nests is a bird-brained idea
While walking or riding on the beautiful heathland near my home, I have noticed a growing number of signs telling…
Girl power! Educating girls can fix the world’s problems
The world is blessed with a brilliant and industrious UN secretary-general, and it was certainly worth tuning in last week…
For Putin, the World Cup is not about football but global respect
Authoritarian regimes love grand international sporting events. There’s something about the mass regimentation, the set-piece spectacle, the old-fashioned idea of…
Patients like being told they need an operation. It doesn’t mean they do
In George Bernard Shaw’s play The Doctor’s Dilemma, written early last century, the knife-happy surgeon invents a nut-shaped abdominal organ,…
Britain’s real-life canals are as mystical and marvellous as Philip Pullman’s books
Philip Pullman’s latest missal, La Belle Sauvage, once again features the boat-dwelling Gyptians. Rough and honourable, they emerge from the…
Australia was ruined the moment Europeans set foot there
Many believed in Australia for 1,000 years before its discovery. There had to be a commensurate weight — somewhere Down…
Has Ann Quin’s time come at last?
Like A Fiery Elephant, my biography of the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson, contains one particularly careless sentence: the one where…
Did the reprisals following the Indian mutiny seal Britain’s fate in the subcontinent?
Many and various are the things one finds in Kentish pubs (I’m told); but few could top the sepoy’s skull…
Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…
My ex-lover’s T-shirt can join the other tragic tat in the Museum of Broken Relationships
I loved a man. But our affair was nasty, brutish and short. Copious weeping was my un-tart retort. All that’s…
What America needs is another Franklin D. Roosevelt
Franklin D. Roosevelt isn’t as popular as he once was. When Barack Obama won the 2008 election, he let it…
How Joseph Lister transformed surgery from butchery to a healing art
Every operation starts the same way. Chlorhexidine scrubbed under nails, lathered over wet hands, palm-to-palm, fingers interlaced, thumbs, wrists, forearms.…
The thrill of living dangerously inspires the latest first novels
Here come three novels marketed as debuts but written by authors with some sort of previous, be it in short…
Peter Carey’s latest novel is a merciless excavation of Australian history
More than 25 years ago, Peter Carey co-wrote one of the most audacious road movies ever made, Wim Wenders’s Until…
Did the fabled Phoenicians ever actually exist?
So the Phoenicians never existed. Herodotus, that unreliable old fibber, made it all up in the Histories. Is this really…
What do Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock and Jimi Hendrix have in common?
On 3 September 1968, Allen Ginsberg appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line. Buckley exposed Ginsberg’s politics as fatuous —…
