Barometer
Mary Queen of Golf? The vote by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers to admit women as members has reawakened…
Diary
In the NHS clinic where I work, adults who suspect they may have Asperger syndrome wait almost a year for…
Disaster in the Dardanelles
From ‘The Dardanelles report’, 17 March 1917: The plan of the government in the case of the Dardanelles Expedition had…
Australian letters
Freedom fighter Sir: How sad is it that, in what turned out to be the last years of his life,…
Portrait of the week
Home Theresa May, the Prime Minister, decided to delay until later in the month the invoking of Article 50 of…
Bureaucrats and barbarians
We have mourned Bill Leak. Now we must avenge him. The time for tears has passed. It’s anger we need…
Words are cheap
Like many Speccie contributors, I was privileged to know Bill Leak personally, although for only about ten months.But through no…
Bill and the Lilliputians
The death of great men illuminate the darkness like lightning on a stormy night. So it is with Bill Leak,…
Ellis is not an island
Interesting timing Kate Ellis. While feminists were busy waxing their broomsticks for International Women’s Day (slash month, slash decades), MP…
Bill, me and 18C
As a writer and raconteur Bill Leak was peerless. He had a larrikin wit of which Henry Lawson would be…
The odd couple
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete…
Got the message?
To cut to the chase, my ten-year-old daughter really liked Beauty and the Beast. And given you’re probably going to…
Mirror, mirror
The exit signs were switched off and the stalls were in utter darkness. One by one, 15 invisible dancers, their…
His dark materials
The enticingly subversive films of Paul Verhoeven were very tempting to me as a schoolboy. When I hit 14, the…
Tail-end Terry
It is often said that Terence Rattigan’s ‘thing’ was his homosexuality and that his disguising of it coloured everything he…
Ersatz erudition
Harry Potter, who uses the stage name Daniel Radcliffe, is a producer’s delight. By now it’s becoming clear that the…
Fatal distraction
I don’t think that I have left a theatre many times feeling as depressed and irritated as after the Royal…
A matter of life and death
It was the crime story that showed us just how much China has changed since its years of social, political…
Australian Diary
Last week, I was on a Brexit road show with the UK Euro-parliamentarian Dan Hannan. Hannan, who has written superbly…
Deplorable notes
Researching for my last piece on Enoch Powell, I was more than a little amused to read about the abuse…
Election notes
Malcolm, take note… As the dust settles on the Western Australian election result, and Labor’s Mark McGowan sweeping to office…
Gettysburg revisited
In Competition No. 2989 you were invited to submit a version of the Gettysburg Address as it might have been…
2301: Age of extremes
Eight unclued lights are of a kind; the remaining two complete four words from a quote, which is appropriately positioned…
Brown study
My sadness at Bill Leak’s death is compounded by the fact that I never met him. But his influence on…
to 2298: NOИ
The unclued lights are titles of Russian novels minus their ‘and’ (И in Russian): 17 CRIME and 9 PUNISHMENT (Dostoevsky),…
