Q&A diary
Spring returned to Sydney for the long weekend, just in time for me to spend three days incarcerated indoors packing…
Empty pews
In conversation with a Liberal insider some weeks ago, I heard the phrase: ‘I’m trying to rebuild the conservative movement…
Artist’s Notebook
When old ‘wobble board’ Rolf was sent up to the big house I felt a sense of relief not because…
Duterte Harry
At a government press conference, a grandstanding British journalist admonished Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, stating to the President of the…
To: Millennial suckers
Dear Leftist Millennials, we need to talk. I’ve noticed you’re becoming more easily wounded than ever. You’ve created a fantasy…
Gunshot wounds
Regardless of who said or emailed what to whom, libertarian Senator David Leyonhjelm’s Adler shotgun blasted a big hole through…
Despite what Big Bang destroyed, there’s still nowhere quite like the City
As the 30th anniversary of Big Bang loomed, I found myself back at the scene of my City demise. Ebbgate…
Conservative Notes
You’d be hard pressed to be overly optimistic about the state of conservative politics in the developed English-speaking world right…
Free speech and the right not to bake a cake
Let us consider the case of the Ashers family bakery in Belfast which, in 2014, refused to make a cake.…
Why didn’t I celebrate Oscar Wilde’s birthday?
On Wednesday 19 October at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane in London, a reception was held to celebrate…
The absent opposition
Oppositions don’t win elections — governments lose them. This has long been the Westminster wisdom. But the truth is that…
How Pete Burns helped to create our fatuous modern world
So RIP Pete Burns, transgendered Scouse popstar. His indescribably awful song ‘You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)’ — clever…
The Spectator’s Notes
World leaders are preoccupied nowadays with what is known as their ‘legacy’. In practice, this means being linked with moral-sounding…
Meaty matters
I’m writing this in the Highlands. Through the window I can see Loch Maree, being ruffled into white-tipped skirls by…
A big beast in Hush Puppies
It always used to be said that, if it had been up to Guardian readers, Ken Clarke would certainly have…
TB or not to be
If you are 70-plus, the shadow of TB will have hung over your childhood and youth, as it did mine,…
A tale of two prisons
The Marshalsea was the best and worst place for a debtor to be imprisoned. From 1438 until its closure in…
A race apart
South African democracy has not, on the whole, been kind to the Afrikaner. During Nelson Mandela’s benign oversight of the…
Tormented genius
Married as I am to an antiquarian book dealer, and living in a house infested with books and manuscripts, I’m…
Shiver me timbers
Brrrrr, this is a chilly book. Each time a character put on his sealskin kamiks, muskrat hat, wolfskin mittens and…
Highly undesirable
Most of us just live in cities, or travel to see them and take them pretty much as they come,…
Fierce indignation
In an autobiographical note written late in his life, Jonathan Swift set down an astonishing anecdote from his childhood. When…
The great Soviet gameshow
In the opening chapter of her history of Soviet Central Television, Christine E. Evans observes two Russian televisual displays of…
A night at the circus
The Royal Opera’s latest production is Shostakovich’s The Nose and to paraphrase Mark Steyn, whatever else can be said about…
Identity crisis
You may not listen to them every year. Or even to every lecture in the current series. But the survival…
