The Met’s ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ is equally horrifying and inspiring
One of the first pieces exhibited in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style – The Met’s annual spring Costume Institute exhibition –…
Backward Bowen’s nuclearphobia is dangerous
Climate Cult and Blackout Minister Chris Bowen is turning Australia into an energy backwater with his nuclearphobia. It’s a very…
Where have all the Japanese tourists gone?
Is the Japanese tourist, for so long in good numbers a welcome and reliable fixture at our most famous tourist…
Tommy Robinson and the truth about jail beards
When Tommy Robinson walked out of prison this week, he was unrecognisable. The far-right activist, who was jailed for contempt…
What’s wrong with using Xenon to climb Everest?
Reaching the top of the world and returning to London within a week without so much as stopping for a…
Britain needs to reindustrialise
In recent years, governments looking for good news on growth have sounded increasingly desperate, like a doctor looking for signs…
Can Scotland learn to love Farage?
There’s not much that’s green in Larkhall, Scotland. So staunchly Protestant unionist is the ex-mining town in South Lanarkshire that…
Israel is going too far
I have kept my silence on the Middle East for ten years. I left Israel in 2015, after five years…
Why shouldn’t vegans be catered for in an apocalypse?
You know you’ve arrived when professors start thinking about how to look after you during a major emergency. As a…
The toxic topic
Within a few months it will be glaringly apparent to the Coalition that they could and should have fought the…
Australian notes
Changing a place name may be annoying, but it is also not inconsequential; in Australia, it is a subtle attempt…
The all-seeing AI
Artificial intelligence has overturned many of the old rules, and the one about ‘seeing is believing’ was perhaps the first…
Craggy man of integrity
Sometimes you’re just too clapped out to attend the most sparkling bit of theatre and so it was for your…
Aussie life
They call America the Land of the Free; it’s right there in the New York Times small print. But the…
Language
Speccie reader Alan writes to say he was having a conversation about Liberal party factions, and (strangely enough!) two expressions…
Dear Mary: How do you leave a party early?
Q. How can you leave a party early – e.g. at midnight rather than 4 a.m. – without everyone thinking…
A challenge for the electric car sceptics
I once heard of a couple who were teachers in their mid-fifties. Having pooled the proceeds from selling both their…
