From the archives
From ‘Economic quackery’, The Spectator, 23 January 1915: Ever since the war began there has been a tendency to rely upon…
Can the Tories pass George’s 13 tests?
By the Chancellor’s 2004 rules, his chances are on a knife edge
It’s all kicking off again in the Islamic world
Everywhere you look there is outrage and fury and screaming and violence
Why are volunteers so mean to one another?
Ask any charitable group. ‘Internecine’ doesn’t do justice to the undercurrents of resentment
Let posh people run the arts – if it means they stop running the country
Every prancing Etonian in tights is a stockbroker, or an ambassador, or a permanent secretary that never happened
Cuckoo clocks, Chinese dragons and magic needles: the pros and cons of currency pegs
Plus: Catching up on the careers of old colleagues at a big birthday
Gagging order
It’s not just Al Murray: British politics is increasingly about who has the most popular joke. The consequences won’t be funny
The Deer
In the summer fields your life left you. She ran out from under the hood of your heart and tottered…
Tony’s toxic legacy
He’d just about sold the idea that businesses weren’t intrinsically evil. Then he started one of his own…
Gay right
The Front National now has the support of a quarter of Paris’s gay voters – and only 16 per cent of the straight ones
The war on fraternities
Just because the biggest scandal involving a fraternity house has fallen to bits, that doesn’t mean universities are stopping their crackdown
Middle Age cred
Johannes Fried’s newly translated history proves that the Middle Ages were not an ideas-free zone
An innocent abroad
Quite a Good Time to be Born is the memoir of a good man written by a great novelist
Too cute
Adam Thirlwell’s ‘tale of suburban sex and violence’ has lost whatever charm his narrative voice once possessed
See how clever
Scott Blackwood’s ultra-clever See How Small is a novel written to be studied, not read
Recent crime fiction
Jeff Noon on Peter May’s Runaway, Dan Kavanagh’s Putting The Boot In, Ferdinand von Schirach’s The Girl Who Wasn’t There, Eric Lundgren’s The Facades
