Second best
The novelist Anita Brookner once declared that in real life hares always beat tortoises: ‘Every time. Look around you. And…
The only way is Essex
We are told this is now a ‘knowledge economy’. Strange, then, that there are so few recent educational buildings of…
Ballet’s battle royal
English ballet erupted out of the second world war in the hands of the rival choreographers Frederick Ashton and Robert…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Cultural revolution
We have read about the remarkable opening up of China in recent years: how many people live there and how…
Diary
The last week in parliament has been the political equivalent of a burger with the lot. The PM’s whistle-stop tour…
Title Stories: The Wonderful Wizard of OZ by L. Frank Baum
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Six weeks after numberplategate, and Argentina’s still going on about it
Perhaps it’s a glaring and personal flaw in my observational skills, but if somebody tried to insult me via a…
Why I intend to become an addict
When the White Queen told Alice she had sometimes believed as many as six contradictory things before breakfast, she spoke…
Why are Labour’s Scots so reluctant to take the high road?
Listen http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_30_Oct_2014_v4.mp3 There should, by rights, have been a stampede of candidates to replace Johann Lamont as the leader of…
Dicing with debt
The Chancellor has given himself eight years to cut spending by less than Denis Healey
Portrait of the week
Home A hundred firemen could not prevent wooden cooling towers at Didcot B gas-fuelled power station in Oxfordshire from burning…
Diary
Plus: Starting the day the Dylan Thomas way — a pint with a raw egg in it for breakfast — and lunch with the other Charles Spencer
From the archives
From ‘Topics of the day’, The Spectator, 24 October 1914: That spies are a great danger at the present time,…
It’s not just Ukip that’s changing Cameron’s mind about immigration
The return of the eurozone crisis has prompted some serious rethinking in No. 10
I don’t care what you wear. I care what you believe
Whether it’s French opera patrons or police in the UAE, somehow it’s the female sex that’s liable to be picked on
Why are kids making posters for their GCSEs?
Most schools seem to think that poster design can teach you everything: English, history, religious studies, geography...
I’ve got a new passion – and I’m in far too deep
It’s at times like this that you regret some of the choices you made earlier in your life
Remember the Negroni Index? At last I’ve found a market that never stops rising
Plus: The perverse effects of capping bankers’ bonuses, and the BBC’s dangerous disdain for capitalism
Winter Words
Calendar pages: one scrumpled day dies in a garden spun to fools’ gold, where wind mews over twigs and bones…
Calling Cameron’s bluff
No, I don’t really think he’ll campaign for withdrawal. But that doesn’t make Eurosceptics’ options any less clear
Death to hipsters
Fashion cults are nothing new, but this one was exceptionally silly and unoriginal
Why counties still count
I don’t care how local councils are arranged. I just want people in England to know where they live
