The agony of Labour’s old-fashioned modernisers
The ‘modernisers’ are curiously stuck in the 1990s – while the party membership has shifted far to the left
The Spectator’s Notes
Plus: the surprising pleasures of a cruise; revisiting Honfleur; the Pink ’Un; Jeremy Corbyn’s out-of-date beard
If Corbyn becomes PM, I’m blaming you lot
With only the slenderest tweaking of the national mood, it could conceivably happen
A twinge of fear, and a glimpse of a harsher world
More often than not, my most memorable travel experiences happened in Muslim countries. I can't see the same happening in a generation's time
Do Nikkei and the FT really share the same journalistic values?
Plus: Busting myths on Lloyds’s takeover of HBOS; AO World’s troubles; and the thrilling Yanis Varoufakis
Despair springs eternal
It's in a long left-wing tradition of consolation and self-reassurance in the face of economic reality
‘The smugglers don’t care’
Dispatches from the beach: ‘The smugglers don’t care what happens – they just put you on the boat and say: go’
Asking too much
Their fundraising practices will have to change, after a huge increase in complaints from the public
The Trump slump
American conservatism has become accustomed to a narrow, purist appeal. It doesn’t have to be
Glasgow
If the Science Centre represents a transition from shipyard to pleasure dome, the Necropolis still stands for the Second City of the Empire
Caves of ice
Chilled, Tom Jackson’s enthralling history of how refrigeration changed the world, takes us from Mesopotamian ice-houses to the Large Hadron Collider
The soul takes flight
Two new books — Rainbow Dust by Peter Marren and In Pursuit of Butterflies by Matthew Oates — celebrate the powerful myths surrounding these ravishing ephemera
Is no one having fun?
Left of the Bang, Claire Lowden’s sparky fictional debut, is a comic exposé of the non-glamour of London life, where no one’s having fun
LA runs riot
All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s buzzing thriller about riots and racial tension in 1992, might just as well have been set yesterday
The crackdown that backfired
There was no Islamic extremism in China until Beijing inadvertently created it, according to Nick Holdstock’s measured history of the Uighurs of Xinjiang
Fancy dress parade
Sir Roy poses as Henry VIII, Rasputin, Tennyson and other assorted princes, priests and poets in a series of mock masterpieces by the photographer John Swannell
Children’s summer reading
Melanie McDonagh’s selections include adventures in Wonderland and in space
Lost horizon
Glamour, romance and a deposed monarch are vividly evoked in Andrew Duff’s nostalgic history of the beleaguered Himalayan former kingdom
Angry, funny, timely
The Mark and the Void, Paul Murray’s follow-up to the much acclaimed Skippy Dies, is sharp, satirical and utterly of the moment
Look at my Fringe
After ten years of covering Edinburgh, Lloyd Evans can at least predict the errors he can't avoid blundering into
Orchestral infallibility
We forget that the great symphony orchestras like the Berlin Philharmonic were once radical project ensembles — until they became part of the establishment
Watery depths
Plus: a Californian light and space artist who would have interested Turner at the White Cube
Pulp fiction
The London Coliseum’s latest dance gala showed that Bourne’s supremacy as the master of popular dance theatre is being challenged by his partner Arthur Pita
