Deeply mysterious
The human urge for personal hygiene has had many improbable side-effects, and I can confidently assert that through the ages,…
The books the Nazis didn’t burn
For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking…
Signs and spellsnich
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes, the great French intellectual, was run over by a laundry van in Paris. He…
Flee or die
Every nation has the right to control its borders, but we in the West are getting a bit too comfortable…
Ripping yarns
In the 1860s, when British visitors first began to explore the high altitude pleasures of Kashmir, it was not just…
Pets in the Blitz
War Horse, by way of book and play and film, has brought the role of horses in war into the…
A great awakening
One afternoon in August 1978, Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan were flying from Beijing to Shanghai. They were on the…
Character floors
Six Storeys on Soho is in a slender grey townhouse on Soho Square: a bar, restaurant and club. It is…
High life
Much like the poor, the charity ball has always been with us, but lately it’s turned into a freak. Something…
Sinking into oppression
We were saying things around the dinner table last Friday night and Gillian Triggs could not stop us. We were…
A solid dose of aggro
This isn’t an easy confession to make in the pages of this august publication, but I grudgingly admire the ACTU’s…
Whose party is it, anyway?
The writing may be on the wall for those lobbyist Liberal Party factional bosses who have successfully defied the decrees…
Another costly folly
Under the guise of compassion and atonement for past injustices suffered by Aborigines, white activists, joined by overseas imports, have…
Low life
I was sitting between mother and daughter on the sofa, and we were having a ‘wee night’ as Glaswegians put…
Progressive
I laughed, in a sympathetic way I hope, when I read a letter in the Daily Telegraph pointing out that…
Real life
Well, there were seven of us in this chain, so it was a bit crowded, to paraphrase a princess. We…
Two hours down the track
Of the great sporting imponderables that have come into clearer view over the past few days — will The Archers’…
Magical thinking isn’t a political position
I’m due to debate the philosopher A.C. Grayling on Saturday about whether there should be a second EU referendum on…
The turf
The longer Donald Trump sits there the better Ronald Reagan looks, not least because he had a sense of humour.…
Barometer
God forbid Irish police investigated Stephen Fry over a complaint of blasphemy, which is no longer a criminal offence in…
Diary
Watching the general election from my newsroom is an out-of-body experience. I’ve been involved in the last five general elections…
The lay of the land
From ‘Schoolboy labour’, The Spectator, 12 May 1917: Work on the land, even though the time be stolen from books,…
No left turn
It would be easy to dismiss Jeremy Corbyn’s launch of the Labour party’s election campaign this week on the grounds…
Australian letters
Lest we etc. Sir: What can account for the hysterical reaction in some quarters to Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s Facebook post on…
