Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, decided to allow ministers to campaign for either side in the referendum on membership…
Diary
Plus: Charlie Hebdo and the disgusting defenders of the assassin’s veto; secrets of the House of SpeakEasy
Drinking at school with Plato
Wine with meals is something they might have at home. Getting smashed, on the other hand, is part of a classical education
Church service
From ‘A Mobilisation of the Church’, The Spectator, 8 January 1916: Suppose the Church were mobilised so that the majority of…
Corbyn is untouchable now
As the Labour leader’s strength grows, more and more moderates will be discarded
The Spectator’s Notes
At the end of next week, a judge will decide whether the ‘trial of the facts’ can proceed now that…
Why we have to stand by the foul, brutal Saudis
In an ideal world both sides in the Sunni-Shia war would lose, with heavy injuries, but we do not want a Saudi Spring
Our leaders’ suicidal urge to sex it up
David Cameron, like Tony Blair, succumbs to the urge to sex things up even when he has a perfectly arguable case
What a spankingly splendid scandal
He’ll make a splendid book some day: Alan Clark meets Alan Partridge
Another banking review is pointless: just carry on naming, shaming and jailing
Plus: Investment opportunities across the Channel; and a story of philanthropic capitalism from the new year honours list
Desperate state
Isis is losing territory. Recruits are deserting. But the hardcore fanatics will never surrender
Abide with Me
Was our first date really a boxer’s funeral? You in pitch, me in black—all in all a noirish affair, how…
The Isis executioner and me
I offered to get Abu Rumaysah a one-way ticket to Syria only weeks before he fled
Rwanda’s new tragedy
British taxes support a regime that even allies admit uses murder to crush political challenge
The painful truth for Ruth
No matter how well the Scottish Conservative leader is regarded, her party is still toxic north of the border
Between the woods and the water
Serhii Plokhy's work explains how this vast, once distant steppe between forest and sea is now regarded as ‘the Gates of Europe’
More terrible beauty
In poetry and memoir, the composer Richard Skelton celebrates his rugged native Cumbria — the chief inspiration for his visionary electronic soundscapes
A posh Del Boy
How Not to Smuggle would have been a better title for Francis Morland’s The Art of Smuggling — about his years as a gentleman drug trafficker
Dancing like a demon
Leila Guerriero tells A Simple Story of one gaucho’s electrifying performance of the malambo — an obscure Argentinian dance more arduous than any feat of athletics
A separation of powers
Dominic Ziegler travels the vast length of the Amur river that forms a natural (if uneasy) boundary between two world powers
