Labour MPs’ next choice: which leadership coup to back
Listen http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/thecleaneatingcult/media.mp3 Jeremy Corbyn’s close friend Tony Benn had five questions he always asked of those in power: ‘What power…
Stop health tourism
We don't have the capacity to fund a worldwide health service – pretending otherwise just imposes a needless burden on both the NHS and the taxpayer
Portrait of the week
Home The Metropolitan Police encouraged people to celebrate VJ Day despite reports in the Mail on Sunday (picked up from…
Barometer
Plus: a Twitter snapshot of the Labour leadership struggle; how much sleep Britain gets; missing planes
Boy soldiers
From ‘What will they do with it?’, The Spectator, 14 August 1915: It is true that in a good many cases…
Time is running out for Labour
The leadership candidates are debating plenty of things – but not how to appeal to the southern and Ukip voters they need for power
The Spectator’s notes
All traces of the celebrations have been cleared away. Were it not for my new Stetson, I might wonder if it had all really happened
The feminists who fell for a bleeding hoax
A ludicrous hoax trend that almost makes me pity its enthusiasts
The clock that stopped: the victory of nuclear arms and defeat of nuclear power
Plus: France’s gift to English taxpayers; and the case for charitable maniacs
Exit the dragon
There’s hardly an industry or a part of the world that isn’t counting on China to keep growing strongly. Soon, that could be a big problem
Recombobulation
My fiancé has coined a word for Saturday recuperation which describes what much of the world does to allay its…
Who’s running Libya?
There are real reasons to worry about Libya Dawn – but also real reasons to try to work with them
The spies we left in the cold
Agents are essential to the fight against terrorism. But our gratitude sometimes seems to come with an expiry date
Best of enemies
It’s not enough to succeed, Gore Vidal said: others must fail — a maxim that works a hundred times better when Australia do the failing
Labour’s losing instinct
Ed Miliband fuelled the left’s ‘great betrayal’ myth – and his changes to the party’s voting system look disastrous
Flashmob rule
Parliaments exist to inject hesitation and circumspection into the legislative process
Old boys’ network
To use the term, we feel, would imply that we have too much respect for ourselves, that we take ourselves too seriously
Wholly German art
My Life with Wagner is the conductor’s perceptive and impassioned account of his lifelong devotion to one of the world’s greatest — and most controversial — composers
The lives of the artists — and other mysteries
Benjamin Wood’s The Ecliptic — both mystery story and thoughtful enquiry into the nature of artistic inspiration — will delight fans of Donna Tartt, John Fowles and The Prisoner
August
The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The…
Idolising Ida
Ida Perkins is alarmingly convincing as the unknown genius of 20th-century American poetry in Muse, Galassi’s lively fiction debut
Venerable father of English history
Henrietta Leyser’s brisk journey through the seven kingdoms of Dark Age Britain centres on the Venerable Bede, the Northumbrian monk who famously wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People while remaining entirely cloistered for 60 years
