A human rights charter: monster or liberator?
At the recent Queensland state Labor conference Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced the government’s commitment to a human rights act, modelled…
Everything you always wanted to know about the Alt-Right* (*but were afraid to ask)
BOSTON, UNITED STATES — The Alt-Right hysteria sweeping the Western world is as overwrought as it is alarming. On the…
The harpies take the weekend off
There’s no business like show business, as the old song goes – and no feminism as purely exhibitionistic as the…
Envirocrats hijack Kokoda
In 2008 Australia developed a ‘Joint’ Agreement with the PNG Government in regard to the management of the Kokoda Trail…
Brexit strategy
For months, now, a hunt has been on for the government’s Brexit strategy. Theresa May has quite rightly refused to…
Coercive conformity
Is there any joint lesson to be learned from so-called Brexit and the unlikely-seeming elevation of Donald Trump to the…
2289: I don’t believe it!
The unclued lights, as a singleton and four pairs with one unclued light doing double duty, are of a kind,…
Workers on boards: red herring from the 1970s or useful negotiating card?
‘We’re going to have not just consumers represented on company boards, but workers as well,’ Theresa May declared in July.…
Arthur Streeton And the Sunlight Clasps the Earth 1895
Last week you could have done some Christmas shopping at the Mossgreen and Sotheby’s art auctions in Sydney. You might…
High priestess of horror
A film critic friend, astonished that I had never heard of Shirley Jackson, told me to go and read her…
Children’s books for Christmas
Maurice Sendak, no mean judge, observed that William Nicholson’s Clever Bill was ‘among the few perfect picture books for children’.…
Rifling through a writer’s desk
Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book by Elena Ferrante. Frantumaglia isn’t strictly a book at all. It’s a celebration of the…
Ripeness is all
‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’ The line from Life of Brian is followed by: ‘It’s not meant to be taken literally.…
A choice of gardening books
Garden design usually breaks out of its confines to become part of the general consciousness only in Chelsea Flower Show…
From man to beast and back again
If there’s one shared characteristic of the so-called ‘new nature writing’ it is a failure, with a few notable exceptions,…
Is this the American Houellebecq?
I Hate the Internet is not so much a novel as a wildly entertaining rant. Jarett Kobek is a self-published…
When reasoning goes wrong
It’s the intellectual bromance of the last century. Two psychologists — Danny, a Holocaust kid and adviser to the Israel…
Australian letters
Abnormal Sir: Just read Rod Liddle’s column ‘The new normal’ in a word ‘BULLSEYE’. Be careful with that spelling if…
Instant gratification
Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with…
No peace, no pussy
The bizarro concept of a ‘President-elect Trump’ came to pass despite the wishes, clearly stated on the stump, of the…
How I learned to embrace my inner toff
I do hope it’s a terrible winter this year: a total bastard where everyone’s snowed into their drives and those…
Can this sweet little girl get out of Aleppo alive?
Every morning, after the children go to school, I turn on my computer to check that Bana Alabed is alive…
The sexy new face of cigarette packaging
Something for which to thank the government, at last. It is much, much more fun buying cigarettes these days. It…
The Spectator’s Notes
It seems perplexing that François Fillon, now the Republican candidate for the French presidency, should be a declared admirer of…
A curse on silky teabags
Inventor of the silky teabag, take a bow. You have achieved something that until now no one would have thought…
