Barometer
A marathon of cheats Russian athletes may be stripped of the medals they won at the 2012 Olympics, but what…
Diary
One of my constituents has been in an Indonesian prison since May. Journalist Rebecca Prosser was arrested with her colleague…
From the archives: the liberty of the battlefield
From ‘Soldiers for the land’, The Spectator, 13 November 1915: It is certain that, when the war is over, tens of…
Portrait of the week
Home David Cameron, the Prime Minister, outlined four changes he sought in Britain’s membership of the EU. He wanted to…
How Technicolor came to dominate cinema
They’ve already found a cure for the common cold. It’s called Technicolor. My first dose of it came during the…
Was Steve Jobs really a genius?
Steve Jobs is a film about a man in whom I have little interest, but for 120 minutes I was…
The man who made abstract art fly
One day, in October 1930, Alexander Calder visited the great abstract painter Piet Mondrian in his apartment in Paris. The…
That Force of Destiny isn’t a great evening is the fault of Verdi not ENO
The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock,…
That Force of Destiny isn’t a great evening is the fault of Verdi not ENO
The Force of Destiny, ENO’s latest offering to its ‘stakeholders’, as its audiences are now called thanks to Cressida Pollock,…
How did this plotless goon-show wind up at the Royal Court?
One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the…
How did this plotless goon-show wind up at the Royal Court?
One of the challenges of art is to know the difference between innovation and error. I wonder sometimes if the…
Bach breaking
It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning…
Bach breaking
It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning…
Australian diary
Some months back, head of government duties meant that I had to decline an invitation to give the Thatcher lecture…
Bridge
The EBU’s Premier League takes place over three weekends and decides who will represent England in next year’s Camrose (home…
Inconceivable
Here we go again. Almost twenty years after it almost brought down John Howard in the 1998 election, the Great…
If the world economy crashes again, blame the central bankers
Like the Christmas pudding sampled by Hercule Poirot at Kings Lacey — but six weeks early — our Spectator Money…
The answer for sensible, moderate Labour folk is simple. Just leave
What a useless shower the Labour party is right now. What a snivelling dance of fools. And I don’t just…
Here’s what’s wrong with the ‘public sector ethos’
An infuriating benefit of readers’ online comments beneath the efforts of a columnist like me is that as you read…
Donald Trump and the Republican cabaret show
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/jeremyhunt-scatastrophicmistake/media.mp3 Washington DC A friend of mine asked his father, aged 82: ‘Dad, at this stage of life, what…
Charles Moore’s Notes: Who’d be a diplomat now?
The other day, a friend told me, he had been chatting to an old friend of his who has spent…
Spying and potting
The main problem with being a TV critic, I’ve noticed over the years, is that you have to watch so…
Of course there’s no morality in top-level sport
Why do transgendered people need separate toilets? I thought, according to the prevalent orthodoxy, that the new gender they had…
The best British short stories — from Daniel Defoe to Zadie Smith
Philip Hensher’s two-volume anthology is bigger and broader than anything else available — and handsome enough to hang on the wall
We could end HIV
Truvada could reduce new HIV infections to zero – if the puritanical health establishment went for it
