Australian notes
The new aristocrats Listen these days to some of the world’s elite politicians, commentators and officials pontificate and you’d think…
Brown study
I should stop saying I am surprised by this or that decision of the Turnbull government. But last week’s one…
Consider this…
Theresa May, arsonist Are you aware that Theresa May, UK Prime Minister, set fire to a residential tower in Kensington,…
Andrew Nicholl A distant view of Derry through a bank of wild flowers
Last week came the welcome announcement of the State Government’s funding of the major extension, indeed doubling, of the exhibition…
Thespian notes
Vacancy for a leader, not a comedian Malcolm Turnbull is the latest Australian politician to risk relations with our most…
Dis-con notes
14 and counting As the Parliament resumed last Monday for its final sitting prior to the winter recess, Newspoll again…
Trouble in Libland
The clock is now ticking on Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership. He currently faces active resistance from more than a score of…
Why I’m sad to see Barclays in the dock – and astonished to see John Varley there
Regular readers know I have an umbilical connection to Barclays, because my father spent his working life there, I was…
What should party leaders be allowed to believe?
‘If he can’t be in politics,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury tweeted last week after Tim Farron resigned the leadership of…
If you’re not tired of London, you’re tired of life
London, city of the damned. City of incendiary tower blocks, jihadi mentals trying to slit your throat, yokels from Somerset…
The Spectator’s Notes
How much longer can it go on? Deaths caused by terrorism are always followed now by candlelit vigils, a minute’s…
Bridge
The past two weeks have seen hundreds of passionate bridge players head for Montecatini in Italy for the 8th European…
Great Tigran’s heir
Tigran Petrosian is the great chess hero of Armenia. World champion from 1963-1969, his best games exhibit a profundity which…
no. 462
White to play. This position is a variation from Kramnik-Giri, Stavanger 2017. How can White exploit the terrible position of…
The Britten Theatre
When friends from overseas with the slightest interest in music ask for recommendations about what to see in London, I…
Brief encounter
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…
Non-magnetic north
Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue…
His Master’s Feet
Gerald Barry once licked Beethoven’s carpet. At least, that’s what he told me, and I’m as sure as any interviewer…
Tall story
‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He…
Trouble in paradise
‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado…
Peter Perrett: How The West Was Won
Much though I loved it at the time, not a great deal of lasting worth came out of that fervid…
An unholy alliance
Israel’s Channel 2 news station improbably made history last week by airing a brief interview with an obscure policy wonk…
Europe’s imploding right
If the British Conservative party is feeling stunned, having calamitously misread the public mood in a general election, then it…
The bigger, better society
The last housing scandal in Notting Hill brought down a Conservative government and transformed the social policy of Britain. Peter…
This uneasy dawn
The Tory party is having the wrong conversation. Whenever two or three Conservative MPs are gathered together, they discuss who…
