Barometer
Selling with honesty An Essex estate agent sold a flat in Westcliff-on-Sea for £22,500 over the £125,000 asking price after…
Diary
I knew, the minute my job was first mooted, on the steps of San Francesco church in the sun-drenched, mafia-infested…
Equality in the trenches
From ‘War the leveller’, The Spectator, 12 February 1916: Strange as it may appear to the pacificist, war has levelled up,…
Australian letters
Inebriated Sir: Dr Tanveer Ahmed’s intemperate rush to make refugee advocates the main culprit for the plight of people in…
Letters
Governmental ignorance Sir: Your leading article (13 February) blames junior doctors for playing with lives in their dispute; but what…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spent time in Brussels before a meeting of the European Council to see what…
Brothers grim
One of the more obscure winners in recent years of the Berlin film festival’s Golden Bear was a version of…
Touching the void
Scholarly filmgoers may recall a movement that sprouted from Danish soil called Dogme 95. It worked to a Spartan set…
Notes on a scandal
How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer…
Internal affairs
The ten vignettes that punctuate the white walls of the Ingleby Gallery invite us to step into the many-chambered mind…
Kerching, Mr Bing
Here’s how to set yourself up for a fall. You stage the world première of your debut play in the…
Kerching, Mr Bing
Here’s how to set yourself up for a fall. You stage the world première of your debut play in the…
Not a pretty sight
‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The…
Not a pretty sight
‘Forget Downton Abbey!’ exhorts David Pountney in the programme for Figaro Forever, Welsh National Opera’s season of Beaumarchais operas, The…
The write stuff
The deadline for Radio 2’s 500 Words competition falls next Thursday. Children between the ages of five and 13 are…
The write stuff
The deadline for Radio 2’s 500 Words competition falls next Thursday. Children between the ages of five and 13 are…
Bridge
Pierre Zimmermann, Monaco’s uber-sponsor, has put another unmissable, thrilling tournament in the calendar. The first European Winter Games gave those…
Flying colours
Five weeks ago, amid the tempestuous climes of mid-January, we threw down the gauntlet for our Prime Minister to prove…
Apocalypse now? Markets seem set on a self-fulfilling prophecy
All this talk of a new financial apocalypse, so soon after the last one, is starting to annoy me. Partly…
South Africa’s promise now lives in a cage
I went back to see my old house in Cape Town last week, and they’d put a cage around it.…
From Rhexit to Brexit
We are all of us to some degree prisoners of our own experience. Experience may teach, of course — may…
Cameron’s first EU referendum battle: shutting up his own MPs
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/putinsendgameinsyria/media.mp3 On the day that David Cameron delivered his Bloomberg speech, the 2013 address in which he committed himself…
The Spectator’s Notes
In his authoritative biography of Pope John Paul II, George Weigel writes lucidly about the unlucid subject of phenomenology. It…
Marty’s way
Vinyl (Sky Atlantic) — the much-anticipated series, co-produced by Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, about the 1970s New York record…
Farty, smelly and in love with Putin? You must be getting middle-aged
There are things that happen when you grow older — bad things, harbingers of death and decay. Past the age of…
