Comfort in melancholy
Geoff Nicholson is the Maharajah of Melancholy. The quality was there in his novels, it was there in his non-fiction…
The Tories would be mad to cuddle up to Ukip
Such is my respect for Spectator readers that I offer you a column whose subtext is in Latin. Ours is…
Investment: Fluttering voters
When you hear the words ‘economic recovery’, do you think: ‘Great! Britain is on the mend’? Or ‘Damn! I should…
Investment: Fluttering voters
When you hear the words ‘economic recovery’, do you think: ‘Great! Britain is on the mend’? Or ‘Damn! I should…
Australian notes
At Julia Gillard’s triumphal rallies, her ecstatic audiences applauded the idea that her valour in standing up to misogyny will…
The end of Aids
In a week in which the world is once again invited to consider the prospect of climatic Armageddon, it would…
Diary
They say nothing beats the feeling of seeing your book in print. But for me, the proudest moment was presenting…
Portrait of the week
Home The General Medical Council said it was dropping cases against four doctors who worked at Stafford Hospital at the…
Tacitus on Damian McBride
Damian McBride’s revelations about back-stabbing in Gordon’s imperial court raise a serious question: what was in it for him? The…
Letters
Why we joined Sir: I was astonished by the assertion made by Wyn Grant (Letters, 21 September) that ‘the postwar…
The Spectator’s Notes
No doubt it will happen, because the Tories will not dare oppose it, but is there any conceivable good reason…
Fury and loathing in the New Labour gang
There is a little vignette in the first volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries that makes it abundantly clear that, at…
What’s wrong with being right?
I’m trying to imagine what Britain would look like under a Ukip/Conservative coalition with Cameron as PM and Farage as…
Am I alone in being bothered about all this surveillance?
Oh, but life’s easier if you’re American. Each and every last way the state meddles with your life is an…
Not so much a property bubble, more an opportunity to improve London’s transport
Everyone —including me, if I’m honest — has been talking about a new property bubble. But is it for real?…
Too close for comfort
George Osborne’s friend at the Times embodies the collapse of boundaries between the media and politics
An African Khmer Rouge
If Al-Shabaab was behind the terrorist attack in Nairobi, then the group has come a long way since its foundation…
The ECHR is ‘unacceptable’
It’s not enough to repeal the Human Rights Act, says Chris Grayling – our Supreme Court, not Strasbourg, must be supreme
Electric daydreams
The winning essay in our contest for exposing environmental pseudoscience takes on the expensive and damaging myth of the electric car
Notes on…The house museums of Paris
It doesn’t matter how many times they expand the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay, Paris’s past is so colossally rich…
