Australian diary
Veteran Canberra hand Laurie Oakes’ prediction of an early federal election was so qualified as to be the political equivalent…
Fermare le barche!
Yet again, the world looks to Australia’s Coalition government, and in particular to Tony Abbott, for guidance on a problem…
Australian notes
I have to concede that I was one of those who long years ago fell for a time under the…
Portrait of the week
Home The British economy grew by 0.3 per cent in the first quarter of 2015, the slowest quarterly growth for…
Barometer
Plus: How Miliband-style rent controls are already working; the riches of Len Blavatnik; and who gets wolf-whistled
Start-up culture in Ancient Greece
Honduras is trying a new idea that worked very well 2,500 years ago
An empire for Islam
From ‘The Khalifate’, The Spectator, 1 May 1915: It seems that the Ottoman Empire is likely to crumble away, and in that…
Letters
Plus: More remembrances of Raymond Carr; a new use for hair cuttings; and why selling off parsonages was a mistake
Warning: this column may soon be illegal
After 8 May, if Labour get in, it may be made illegal to disparage Islam. So I’d better get it out of my system
The British public is about to make a big mistake
I love the British people. And I believe they are about to make a stupid and unfathomable mistake
Russell Brand is the future, like it or not
Ed Miliband just went to meet the future of the media (under cover of darkness)
Only the Tories can meet the aspirations of Ikea’s hard-working families
Plus: the homesick non-doms of HSBC; and some ways to reform inheritance tax
This is May
The soot sunk clouds have gone — to blacken someone else’s landscape. The tugging, ripping, girl-fight wind that stole the…
Miliband country
The manifestos of a potential ‘progressive alliance’ pose a profound threat to the countryside
Vote Tory
Election-day addresses from Andrew Roberts, Julian Fellowes, Michael Burleigh, Susan Hill, Robin Hanbury-Tenison and David Hare
Mansion migrants
The super-rich can shrug off Labour’s big tax idea. People like me will be forced out
The people from the sea
Most survive the terrible journey. The next steps are less certain, for them and for Europe
Tinder feelings
These apps help people to make social connections — but at the cost, perhaps, of sexualising social life
Plan Bee
There is a system that accounts for intensity of passion as well as idle opinion – hives have used it successfully for millions of years
The raw material of fiction
According to Zachary Leader’s latest biography, Saul Bellow was a great looter of life, rifling his most painful relationships for material for his novels
The sick man of Europe finally succumbs
According to Eugene Rogan’s The Fall of the Ottomans, the collapse of the millennium-old empire triggered most of the problems that plague the Middle East today
