The Great Cultural Swindle
Forget about the ‘culture wars’. What Australia, and indeed the West, is now being subjected to, and in many ways…
Spectator Australia wine club – September 2017
He walked onto the seaside balcony like he was walking onto a yacht, to paraphrase Carly Simon. The only difference…
Oh brave new gender-fluid world…
Later this year, the Advertising Standards Authority will reveal to the world their list of rules designed to wipe out…
Greater Oxbridge
Oxbridge is an ivory-tower state of mind, perhaps, or at least two ancient rival universities, but how about this: in…
Why is the National Trust hounding hunters?
For the sound of his horn brought me from my bed/ And the cry of his hounds which he oft…
Lessons from Houston
The numbers are awesome. In a matter of hours, Hurricane Harvey dumped nine trillion gallons of rainfall on Houston and…
‘Kill! Kill!’ yelled the mob
Laikipia, Kenya Following Kenya’s recently concluded elections, I took a walk on my Laikipia farm and lit up a cigar,…
Iran is our natural ally
The Saudi town of Awamiya — like so many countless cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen that are witnessing an…
Too Indian to adopt
I am not surprised that the mother of a white Christian girl should be upset that her daughter was placed…
Let’s redo lunch
As a young sub-editor on the Times in 1926, Graham Greene, future author of The Quiet American and Brighton Rock,…
Forgive and forget
To begin with, Theresa May was not planning to take a three-week holiday — but she was subtly advised that,…
Flavour of the month
In Competition No. 3013 you were invited to submit a poem in praise or dispraise of August. There was…
Dear Mary
Q. Our best friends own a house in Morocco which sleeps about ten. They rent it out but go two…
Well of sorrows
The Red-haired Woman is shorter than Orhan Pamuk’s best-known novels, and is, in comparison, pared down, written with deliberate simplicity…
Finally tired of London
Iain Sinclair is leaving London — like the croakiest of the ravens taking flight from the Tower. It is a…
Mozart’s mischievous muse
If you were to compare Mozart to a bird it wouldn’t be the starling. Possibly the wood thrush or nightingale,…
Stage fright
Patrick McGrath is a master of novels about post-traumatic fragmentation and dissolution, set amid gothic gloom. His childhood years spent…
The writer behind the brand
Few publishing phenomena in recent years have been as gratifying as Chris Kraus’s cult 1997 masterpiece I Love Dick becoming…
A flawed and dangerous theory
If there were a prize awarded to the book with the best opening line, A. N. Wilson would be clearing…
The art of the arabesque
The title of this book, By the Pen and What They Write, is a quotation from the Qur’an and comes…
City of dreadful dusk
Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or…
Mysticism and metamorphosis
‘I frankly hate Descartes,’ states a character in Nicole Krauss’s new novel, Forest Dark: ‘The more he talks about following…
The last great adventure
Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well…
A grand inquisitor
Hidden behind Kensington Palace, in one of London’s smartest streets, there is a grand old house which played a leading…
A clash of loyalties
If someone was to lob the name Antigone about, many of us would smile and nod while trying to remember…
