Letters
Cathedral going Sir: While I enjoyed much of Simon Jenkins’s analysis of why England’s cathedrals are thriving (‘Why cathedrals are…
The road to the Jungle
Calais On Sunday evening a British motorist, Abraham Reichman, 35, from Stamford Hill, north London, hit two Eritrean migrants who…
Sea strategy
From ‘Decisive victory at sea’, The Spectator, 7 October 1916: The only excuse for changing our views of the magnificent rightness…
The Big Con
In the wake of South Australia’s instant State-wide blackout on September 28, and the political storm that followed the physical…
Portrait of the week
Home The pound fell against the dollar and the euro, weakening by 19 per cent against the dollar from its…
Gamesters of Triskelion
I first encountered the Triskelion, the traditional coat of arms of the Isle of Man, when I saw Laurence Oliver’s…
Is that a bomb in your pocket? Or a spy? Or both?
Remember how much fun it used to be getting a new phone? I think of a friend a few years…
And the answer is…
Doorstoppers, slim volumes, loose leaves stacked in a box, bound pages fretworked with holes, epistolary exchanges, online postings, palimpsests…. Fiction…
Lights, camera, politics
At the end of Sunday night’s US presidential debate, the moderators snuck in a final question from a slightly shell…
Will Brexit butcher the banks?
The financial crisis defines our age. It helps explain everything from the presidential nomination of Donald Trump to Jeremy Corbyn’s…
Jolly good show
It’s tempting for a Brit to look over the Atlantic and smugly conclude that, after 240 years, the American experiment…
We’ve listened, we’ve learned
Let me say it upfront: on greyhounds, the Government got it wrong. Banning the industry was a mistake, and we…
Vanity bombing
‘When you’ve shouted Rule Britannia, when you’ve sung God Save the Queen, when you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth…’…
Human live baiting
While the NSW Government worked itself into a lather over greyhounds chasing ‘live bait’, speaking emotively of bunny rabbits being…
Words on the street
A white van pulls up outside St Giles in the Fields, an imposing 18th century church in central London, around…
Bridge
The Hubert Phillips is one of the EBU’s quirkier knockout tournaments. Firstly every team must contain (and play) at least…
Have gun, will kill
Woody Allen said of crime that the hours were good and you meet a lot of interesting people. I don’t…
No. 430
White to play. This position is from Mamedyarov-Kramnik, Moscow 2016. White’s next concluded the game. What was it? Answers to…
Universities challenged
On the face of it, this year’s Nobel Prize awards have been a triumph for British scientists. No fewer than…
Hong kong: Eating it up
The brilliant thing about Hong Kong is that you don’t have to worry for a second about all the culture…
Hard Brexit, soft sterling and a glimpse of the Night Manager across the water
This column comes from Puerto Pollensa in Majorca, my favourite off-season watering-hole. The hotel is full of elderly Daily Mail…
May’s head on the block
Understand what this government is trying to get away with, and think about how it is trying to get away…
The Spectator’s Notes
Given all the outrageous things that Donald Trump has done and said already, why has he got into so much…
Australian letters
Abstract profit Sir: I once worked in a factory opposite a sign writer who used a large panel to test…
Mississippi hospitality
Driving into Greenwood after dark, we pull into a gas station and ask directions to a late-night grocery store. ‘Sir……
