Consider this
Beware socialists in white coats Sir Michael Marmot, whom the ABC chose to deliver the 2016 Boyer lectures, is the…
A rose between two thorns
Emma Rauschenbach was the daughter of rich Swiss industrialists — a plump, good-natured girl, nicknamed ‘Sunny’, who married young without…
Bridge
The 15th World Bridge Games (formerly known as the Olympiad) began on 3 September in Wroclaw, and is providing more…
Exquisite mementoes
All alone on page 313 of this spectacular book, a tattered but heroic flag flies in a painting of an…
no. 426
White to play. This position is a variation from Li Chao-Short, Baku Olympiad 2016. White has various ways to win…
The trouble with actors
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Eimear McBride’s acclaimed, prize-winning debut, felt like a one-off, not the beginning of a…
2278: Will alterations
Across clues contain a definition and a jumble of the answer. In each row of the grid, a Shakespearean character…
Hoarder disorder
The enormous desk on which I am writing this is swamped by four precarious piles of books, one topped by…
The Battle for Britain
The post The Battle for Britain appeared first on The Spectator. Got something to add? Join the discussion and comment…
The great Dadaist novel
Anicet is, as its cover proclaims, a Dadaist novel, reissued on the centenary of its composition. Louis Aragon would doubtless…
A remarkable testament of hope for Zimbabwe
‘One who never turned his back but marched breast forward, Never doubted clouds would break, Never dreamed though right were…
A lively, rebellious boy
It is one of the great set-pieces of high drama in English history. The king, shamed by his part in…
The new world of work is a jungle but don’t call workers ‘animals’
The TUC general secretaryFrances O’Grady doesn’t get a lot of airtime. Compared with predecessors a generation ago, such as Vic…
Hit and miss
A few years ago, a reporter from the Chicago Tribune stumbled upon what was widely reported as ‘the Holy Grail…
Are grammar schools more meritocratic?
It is highly unlikely the Prime Minister has read the book,’ my father harrumphed, commenting on the appropriation of the…
Ghosts of the past
You find it in the vistas of skeletal metal gangways, the abandoned 18th-century forts, the squat oil holders and rusted…
This looks like the greatest rugby side ever
British Lions fans of anervous disposition should avoid the telly of a Saturday morning. Live before your very eyes, as…
Dancing with robots
Back in 2012, a team at Google built a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence network and fed it ten million randomly selected…
Low life
Last week in Ladakh I went panting from one Buddhist monastery to another. Culturally, racially and historically, Ladakh is Tibetan,…
Estate agent
A big misunderstanding about art is that it excites serene meditation and transcendent bliss. But anyone who has worked in…
From now on, we must all be equally stupid
A lecturer at a reasonably well-respected northern plate-glass university was somewhat perplexed by a student who complained about her poor…
Cooking the books
Cooking really shouldn’t make good radio. On television, it’s already frustrating that you can’t taste what you’re seeing, but on…
Diary
The borderline between fact and fiction becomes ever hazier, I find. Last February, Daisy Goodwin — the author of the…
In the shadow of Picasso
‘My painting is an act of decolonisation,’ declared Wifredo Lam. These are the first words you read on entering the…
Derailing the bandwagon
Malcolm Turnbull, George Brandis and the Coalition are to be applauded for sticking to their guns on the Same Sex…
