Mind games
Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall enjoys the dubious status of a modern classic. A black mental-health patient, Christopher, is about to…
Mind games
Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall enjoys the dubious status of a modern classic. A black mental-health patient, Christopher, is about to…
Myth-making
For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…
Myth-making
For years I have been telling people that they should listen to, in the absence of staged performances, Enescu’s opera…
Australian diary
April 2012. News Limited newshound Steve Lewis and I are hustling to a meeting at the ABC’s headquarters in Ultimo.…
Consider this…
Colin Dillon – Straight shooter In times of shrill complaint, it is worth contemplating the life and career of…
Consider this…
Colin Dillon – Straight shooter In times of shrill complaint, it is worth contemplating the life and career of…
Bridge
If you live in (or anywhere near) London, and you enjoy a good teams tournament, you could do no better…
Unenchanted
For the first time in living memory, many conservative Australians are unenchanted by the choices facing them at the ballot…
Warning: top-performing funds are highly likely to contain tobacco
Axa will no longer invest in the tobacco industry: the French insurance giant will sell €184 million of shares and…
My six months of madness
I once went mad in Africa and it was no fun at all. I was snorkelling off the coast of…
If I were in charge of Leave, here’s what I’d say…
It may be too late. But with only about three weeks before our referendum on EU membership I am itching…
This referendum has shown us the real Cameron
Westminster has a tendency to get ahead of itself. MPs want to discuss the aftermath of an event long before…
The Spectator’s notes
Obviously there is no such thing as ‘Cameronism’, as there is ‘Thatcherism’; but once upon a time, David Cameron did…
Counting on sheep
Going Forward (BBC4, Thursdays) is a BBC comedy about the continuing adventures of Kim Wilde, the fat, cynical but lovable…
Diary
Why do we assume all doctors are good? We don’t think there are no bad cooks or bad plumbers. But…
Baby love
I like Radio 4 — you can have it on in the background burbling away for hours and hours without…
Baby love
I like Radio 4 — you can have it on in the background burbling away for hours and hours without…
Australian notes
I dropped in the other day to the Sydney Writers’ Festival to hear Stan Grant deliver his autobiographical and sometimes…
Voters have no time for the flaccid centre
A depression has settled on the Liddle household ever since Norbert Hofer narrowly failed in his bid to become the…
Speech impediment
But why use Important Poets as opera librettists? The results, such as in Mark Simpson's Pleasure at Opera North, are usually terrible. That said, Iain Bell's In Parenthesis for WNO somehow works
Lies, damned lies and…
George Osborne has felt the need to concoct figures in a way that would embarrass even Gordon Brown
Portrait of the week
Plus: Boris Johnson provokes ‘Hitler’ Brexit row, Old Trafford evacuated as fake bomb is found, Ukrain wins Eurovision
Diary
Also in her Spectator diary: the great Twitter puddle fight, the glories of Peru, and power packing
Barometer
Name check 306 business people signed a letter to the Daily Telegraph saying that Britain would be better off outside…
