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
A choice of crime novels
Victims long dead exact their revenge in novels from Ian Rankin, Francesca Kay, Lynda La Plante and Helen Dunmore
The great inscape
While obsessing over ‘evil thoughts’ and self-indulgence in his journals, Hopkins still glories in God’s grandeur and the pattern of creation
The wandering Jew
The 2005 Hungarian blockbuster is finally available in English. It has probably taken this long to translate it
Moving statues
Monuments used to come down with much greater regularity than today. The mob of Bologna once even destroyed a Michelangelo masterpiece
Eurovision
The museum has done an inspiring job in repurposing some of its great marvels for its new post-Schengen galleries
Alice in cyberspace
Plus: a new Stoppard play at Hampstead Theatre whose ideal audience would be a theatre full of Sir Toms
