Diary
On New Year’s Day I went for a swim off Broad Haven beach in Pembrokeshire. The water was 10.3ºC: pretty…
A killing to celebrate
From ‘News of the Week’, The Spectator, 6 January 1917: The war has been crowded with romantic adventures by sea…
Sir Ivan’s exit
The wonder about Sir Ivan Rogers’s resignation as Britain’s ambassador to the EU is that he was still in the…
Letters
Meatloaf monarchy Sir: I realize that sending pro-republic letters to the Spectator Australia is akin to sending meatloaf recipes to…
Portrait of the week
Home Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, resigned; he had been expected to play an important part in…
Attack of the Offendotrons
It’s impossible to ignore the story of Greig Tonkins, the Taronga Park zookeeper who punched a giant roo to save…
Playing with holy fire
In the nearly four years since he was elected, Pope Francis I has achieved the singular distinction of bringing the…
A new breed of ‘historian’
In the next few weeks, thousands of young Australians, having just finished 12 years of schooling, will be preparing themselves…
Make Australia Great Again
1. Slash Corporate Tax. The centrepiece of the Coalition’s re-election pitch was the ‘enterprise tax plan’ which will see Australia’s…
Annus wonderfulus
For much of last year, left wing media invoked ‘2016’ as a rod with which to chasten the insufficiently progressive.…
Munchkins and mischiefs
Arthur Rackham shouldn’t have lived in anything as conventional as a house. It should have been a gingerbread cottage, like…
Long suffering
Silence is Martin Scorsese’s film about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan whose faith is sorely tested, just as your patience…
Ways of seeing
‘Radical’ is like ‘creative’, a word that has been enfeebled to the point of meaninglessness. Everybody seems to want to…
Giving it both barrels
In Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph regrets the drab field-grey that has replaced his army’s…
Joining the dots
A new website, radio.garden, lets us browse radio stations across the globe. Nothing new about that. That’s been a key…
Holmes spun
One of the few intelligent responses from the liberal-left to our radically altered political landscape was an essay published last…
Hedda Garbler
Hedda Gabler is one of the most influential plays ever written. It not merely illuminated an injustice, the enslavement of…
Jim Maxwel
Two of the ABC’s most admired radio presenters have published books that are perfect holiday reading: Richard Fidler’s Ghost Empire…
Java diary
Outdoors, Jakarta’s heat and humidity were oppressive. Inside the 6th World Peace Forum (WPF), most delegates were in heated agreement…
Australian notes
Malcolm the Fission Fiasco I don’t agree with all those many right-of-centre commentators who think the current Prime Minister, Mr…
Deplorable notes
Which was the most tragic celebrity casualty of 2016? Was it George Michael, the most gifted queer since William Shakespeare?…
Obama notes
Stabbing an ally in the back After so injudiciously ratifying the Paris climate agreement on the very day Donald Trump…
The evil of 2334
If, as the Australian newspaper implied this week, The Spectator Australia has played a minor role in the recent acknowledgment…
An unmagnificent seven
One of the most interesting developments in modern publishing has surely been the revival of interest in women writers of…
